Educational Models of Social Cohesion in Marginal Contexts: The Social Space as an Educational Agent

Abstract

The main objective of this research is to analyze the relationship between the advance of social marginality and education as a tool of social cohesion, making an exploratory study of a qualitative nature that is limited to the scope of the doctoral study by the same author, started in 2015: “Advanced Marginality and Social Space: New Models of Cohesion, El cado de Torreblanca”. Advanced marginality (Wacquant in Parias urbanos. Marginalidad en la ciudad a comienzos del milenio. Ediciones Manantial, Buenos Aires, 2006), shows the constant advance of the phenomenon, and the need for new public policies and social inclusion. Democracy—understood as an aspiration to the realization of the well-being of every individual that does not correspond to mere principles of utility, but to the possibilities of action and choice within alternative combinations accessible to all—has as its primary objective the training of all citizens (Sen in La libertà individuale come impegno sociale. Editori laterza, Bari, 2007). In a democratic government, one way to offer this set of capacity-action that Sen (La libertà individuale come impegno sociale. Editori laterza, Bari, 2007) defines as a capability, could be to invest in education, in the construction of a paideia, promoter of rights and opportunities, capable of really making the free individual. Education has to be, then, a protagonist in the construction of social spaces—which become educational agents—in which people can show, with facts and words, who they are and what they can do (Arendt in Men in the Dark Times. Ancourt Brace, New York, 1986), through an educational model oriented to human development (Nussbaum in Creare capacità. Liberarsi dalla dittatura del Pi, Bologna, 2012), and to promote educational experiences of social cohesion, which start from the focal point that each human being is constituted as a being whose singularity is realized in plurality (Mortari in A scuola di libertà. Formazione e Pensiero autonomo. Raffaello Cortina, Milano, 2008).