Editorial

Abstract

In welcoming their students, all formal education providers and training systems share an ethical and deontological duty to promote, safeguard and protect the conditions that ensure the acquisition of knowledge and skills, within a context of personal, community and social wellbeing.
For universities in particular, in recent years, this task has evolved alongside all the other aspects of governance: from equal opportunities to transparency, from mobility to study support, from reception to orientation, etc. Over the past years and decades, universities have developed a deep sense of social responsibility and public engagement. However, this change has not always been accompanied by the development of an appropriate insti-tutional and organizational culture and a corresponding pedagogical and teaching practice to respond to new needs, different expectations and demands for recognition and care. The university institution’s lack of systematic caring thinking has sometimes promoted actions that are only useful for intervening to «fix» problems that have, from time to time, arisen. The discomfort felt by people within universities is, instead, often related to the use of devices that are exclusively performance-oriented and that often ig-nore the individuality, histories, needs, desires, and potential of students, their families, faculty, technical-administrative staff, the world of work, the entire territory, etc. From a pedagogical perspective, in the medium to long term, a «restorative» approach is rarely an effective means of promoting an «intelligence of the university institution» that can situate emerging problems within a new ecology of operation that goes beyond the simple management of problems and promotes an alternative resolution. This issue of Pedagogia Oggi aims to initiate a reflection on the role that university can play today in promoting a culture of education that is never divorced from wellbeing and that safeguards the dimension of humanitas in the people and relationships that inhabit it. In recent years, too many stories of abandonment, failure, shame, and helplessness have been associated with uni-versity living, which, on the contrary, should be an opportunity for growth, an existential passage in which intelligence, passions, and projects can flourish. This translates into an invitation to rethink the university institution as a place and time in which participants can construct and negotiate meaning and encounter new experiences, learning the heuristic value of error, the joy of starting afresh, and the wonderful effort of ideation and planning.