Virtue and citizenship. Two "educational" ideas

Abstract

The history of ethical and political thought and that of pedagogical ideas share some common aspects and themes. It is known, for example, that in classical Greece citizenship was closely connected with the sharing of a cosmos of values, attitudes and social practices centred around the idea of "virtue"; this connection, which im-plied the transmission of that cosmos of values and attitudes from one generation to the next, constitutes a central element in the history of Western culture and education.
After an analysis of some of the main ancient and modern positions in this regard, this paper focuses on the principal pedagogical theories of the twentieth century; in fact, a wide-ranging debate regarding democracy and the "educational" needs that its stability and prosperity implies took place during the last century. It is possible to grasp harmonies and dissonances through diverging ideological options, which the “global” perspective as-sumed today by the main trends in contemporary political and educational theories tries to overcome.