La comunità nella ricerca pedagogica

This essay is dedicated to the community in pedagogical research and, to this aim, begins with a reflection on the growing educational need for community today. We have chosen to discuss “community” starting from the debate in education between the 20th and 21st centuries, since pedagogical analysis looks at the “community issue” starting from an obvious fact: although everyone comes into the world within a community, these realities are not always educational, as they are not oriented towards the common good. Therefore, a reflection on educational community requires us to distinguish it from those forms of associated life that are closed, because they are guided by an individualistic logic where the ideal of good life is forgotten. To understand the reasons for this oblivion, educational practices and pedagogical theories of the 20th century are reconstructed, a period when the community received increasing attention and became increasingly clear as an educational place. Finally, from a brief overview of some communities in our society, it emerges that community is a term that does not always correspond to an educational space in a democratic and participatory sense, because it may become closed off, generating identity processes that promote individualism, selfishness and possession rather than openness and altruism. A community is educational only when it becomes empathetic, a space where everyone is a co-author, capable of welcoming the good for everyone in its legitimate diversity.