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This paper presents an overview of some of the major themes addressed by the Multidisciplinary Course on Human Rights Education coordinated by the author for the Department of Education, Languages, Interculture, Literature, and Psychology - FORLILPSI) of the University of Florence in collaboration with the Italian Committee for UNICEF. The main thrust of the course and therefore of these notes was and is valorisation of children’s rights education as a resource for combating the various types of discrimination that underlie processes of exclusion and social marginalization and that increase risks of educational poverty and cultural deprivation. More in detail, we analyze that set of cultural practices, behaviours, and beliefs that generate sexist and racial prejudices and lead to systematic violation of the rights of social groups, which thus suffer processes of inferiorisation.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an analysis of the most interesting insights expressed by Ellen Key in her famous work Barnets Århundrade [The Century of the Child]. Here she anticipates and fosters some of the principles concerning the new, twentieth-century concept of the Rights of Children. Thus, this paper will suggest that Key’s text, far from being a naïve and optimistic manifesto, can be instead defined as a clear and keen work, which shows the way to the development of a new childhood culture, focused on the full recognition of the child and of his/her rights.The paper will focus on the main elements of the theoretical framework supporting the pedagogical perspective Key shows in The Century of the Child. Then, attention will be drawn to the meaning and the relevance of her position on children’s rights: central to the discussion will be those principles that turn out to be more influential in the current debate on the rights of the child: the right to be loved, to choose his/her parents, to be naughty.

In the first part of this contribution the main guidelines that have characterised the training of secondary teachers in Italy in the last 15 years will be drawn. They will highlight the legislative and regulatory issues for the completion of university education in order to gain access to the paths of employment in secondary schools. In particular, we will emphasise the organisational and political conditions that have given form and content to the paths of specialisation/ teaching qualification and, on the basis of a widely established literature in the current debate, we will reflect on how much and how these settings correspond to precise cultural views that feed a certain idea of school, of teacher and ultimately of society. In the second part, starting from direct experience of initial training for secondary school teachers, we will resume the steps of a reflective practice on the political and cultural role for the teacher, whose valorisation must be explicitly invoked in the context of training and refresher courses, to complete the process of professional preparation adequate for the challenges of our time.

Abstract: Il contributo intende riflettere lungo una direttrice storico-critica intorno ai nessi che nell’ultimo scorcio del secolo XX si sono venuti a instaurare tra diritti di protezione e diritti di partecipazione attiva all’interno del dibattito culturale sulla figura del bambino-cittadino dell’attuale società democratica e complessa. La questione non è marginale: vi è una “paradossalità” insita nell’idea stessa dei diritti di prima generazione estesi a un soggetto minore d’età che deve essere ancora adeguatamente risolta: entrano in gioco pesanti pregiudizi che ancora spingono a ritenere il bambino un soggetto “incompiuto”, per usare il termine impiegato da Moro (1991), ossia incapace per le proprie caratteristiche costitutive di agire nei contesti sociali producendo cambiamenti (Baraldi, 2008). Quando poi il problema si sposta sul piano del rapporto coi mass media, allora la preponderanza della dimensione della protezione, rispetto a quella della partecipazione, diventa pressoché totale: posta particolare attenzione alle questioni riguardanti i rischi dell’adultizzazione precoce, della mercificazione e, più in generale, della violenza simbolica cui è sottoposta l’infanzia nella società dei consumi e delle tecnologie (Postman, 1982; Popper, Condry, 1996; Bourdieu, 1997), si cercherà di circoscrivere la visione “apocalittica” (Eco, 1964) per indicare alcuni elementi critici che possano risultare utili per la promozione di un approccio educativo finalizzato a restituire protagonismo attivo al bambino-cittadino-consumatore.

A reconstruction of José Ortega y Gasset’s thought processes is proposed in this paper. Specific attention is given to the genesis both of the militant concept of the philosophy of life, and of the pedagogic role of Ortega in the historico-social context to which he belongs. Thus, this analysis focuses on the principal works of the author during his early period. The aim is to have the author’s continuity in thought and attitude emerge since these also characterise his writings and commitment in the following years. This reconstruction is based on: Ortega’s complete works as published, in part posthumously, in Revista de Occidente in the period 1932-1983; and a selection of critical studies which appeared from the 1950s to the present which support the relevance of the interpretation proposed here.

A framework for the history of children’s rights within a pedagogical perspective enables us to watch your child in a new light, that only in the twentieth century began to emerge slowly buy up to a final takeover at the end of the century: the child understood as legal person, an active subject of rights and equal relationships that link him to the adult. Much has been written about the historical milestones that have paved the ideal and material changes to the twentieth-century idea of childhood, up to the International Convention on the Rights of the Child.