The Right of Children to Use Cultural Heritage as a Cultural Right

Abstract

The contribution analyzes the children’s right to use the cultural heritage, in all its forms, and it shows how it is a cultural right aimed at strengthening children’s skills profiles and raising the quality of education. It focuses on the idea that denial of this right is nothing but the other side of the coin of social and cultural exclusion. The goal of the contribution is to highlight the reflections produced following a series of empirical research conducted by the author in the Italian and international fields focused on the relationship between literacy, multiliteracies and cultural and museum use. The idea of cultural heritage as tangible and intangible signs of culture and as bearers of its symbolic systems leads us to speculate how their failure to use specific categories of individuals only makes cultural gaps stronger and nourishes new forms of exclusion. The right to fruition is in fact still closely connected to the robustness of the profile of skills and socio-economic variables, which can be said to be the indicator of profound inequalities. Even today, in fact, the use of cultural heritage is adopted as an indicator of the cultural status of a certain population. This leads to reasoning on how important it is, from a very young age, to enable each individual to consciously enjoy cultural goods, so that various inequalities do not increase and culture should no longer serve to console men in sufferings, but to protect them from them, fight them and eliminate them. The contribution analyzes these issues by trying to capture the interrelationships between culture, cultural heritage and education in reference to the rights and quality of education.