La relazione educativa “affettiva”: ripensare il rapporto tra scuola e famiglia

Educational co-planning and co-responsibility between school and family have been a subject of pedagogical consideration for several years. The literature identifies critical points in the construction of educational partnerships between them because of transformations occurred both in family and in school: they seem to have missed their clear symbolic value. Once, the roles of the adults (teacher or parent) were more important than the persons who actually embodied them; now, instead, we observe a loss in the symbolic value of generational gap and this has implied a change in the educational relationship. It is a shift from an educational style mainly based on authority and norms to one based on affection and intimacy. We can also observe how many teachers feel their professional role underestimated by their students' parents, and that, in turn, they blame the parents for their weakness in the educational role. This has engendered a widespread crisis in education and a breaking of the pact between generations, both horizontally (among adults) and vertically (generation of educators and generation of "children"). This paper aims to analyze the causes of this issues concerning the crisis of educational relationships with the purpose of identifying possible ways to build new educational partnerships between school and family.