Education for Citizenship: the role of school and city in the formation of children and adolescents and local development

Abstract

We intent to reflect on education policies that promote citizenship as well as on the role of cities as educational spaces capable of making children and teenagers appropriate the reality around them and interpret the world from their space of reference: the local community. In order to accomplish that, the school opens itself for the community to participate on educational processes, articulating knowledges, cultures, experiences and different world visions in the classroom. The goal is to provide a fruitful learning process that relates to the student’s life experiences and problematizes the main issues affecting them: the fact that they life confined in their houses or in schools with huge walls and shopping malls, being disciplined to be happy and docile, without developing critical sense. The seriousness of all that lies on the fact that this process is naturalized, acquainted and accepted by society members. With this paper, we hope to contribute to the discussion and debate about the need to rethink educational policies, from a broad view of planned education that goes far beyond the school as an institution and considers the city as a learning space by excellence, with all of its contradictions, problems and potentialities, with its urban and suburban culture, simultaneously local and cosmopolitan.