Children’s rights and adults’ duties. Critical issues and future prospects

Abstract

The essay aims at reconstructing today’s debate on children’s rights, highlighting how it has concrete epistemological repercussions on pedagogy itself, a knowledge called upon to historicise the prerogatives of children in their concrete environments of life, relationships and development, both formal and informal. In particular, the essay dwells on the critical elements that characterise contemporary society, with more and more rights but fewer and fewer children, and on the need for an integral ecology of the human being capable of ensuring full pedagogical sustainability for the culture of childhood. A new pedagogical vision, therefore, capable of rebalancing the protagonism of the child with the insurrogable function – of guidance, accompaniment and help – carried out by the adult.

Keywords

• children’s rights
• 1989 un convention
• childlessness
• pedagogy
• educational relationship