Educational culture and sustainable development. A research in Campania.

The crisis that has affected and still affects some countries of the western world - defined as an economic crisis or as the crisis of development understood as a consume-related growth - can find its origins in a wider frame encompassing not only the economic system but also the very culture of late modernity. The research work we intend to carry on wants to investigate the purposes of the education and training systems of an area of the Neapolitan territory, with the aim of identifying new and more congruent strategies with relation to the social realities and needs of citizens. Our aim is to investigate if, in times of crisis, education can help introducing new paths whose goal is to overcome the narrow and threadbare old ones of a reproduction without any innovative spirit. A society that wants to be characterized only in terms of its consumption, regardless of costs, does not look towards a future affecting mainly those who come after. For the current society, today is the only thing that matters, and this today erases both history and biology, past and future. Socio-cultural realities attracted only by consumerist values lack those values that can be found in social citizenship, where the sense of people's participation can not be reduced to mere consumption. It is through an educational culture that people actually live the territory in which they reside, enhancing its resources and protecting them from speculation that could call into question their life. This happened in Campania, where we now know the violence perpetrated for decades by Camorra groups on a territory defined as dead because the soils and groundwater are polluted with waste and garbage of all kinds spilled uncontrollably into fertile land. Only today the population realizes the havoc exercised over their environment, becoming aware of the enormous increase in incurable diseases that have affected children and adults in recent years. Although studies on sustainable development have in recent years been notable for management issues in specific regions (see the acts of the conventions/meeting of the GDRI INTI network on HaL-SHS), the literature on this topic has not achieved important results. We are missing a reflection aimed at understanding the links between education and participatory and sustainable development in service companies. With regard to the epistemological elements, we are lacking micro-macro analysis targeted to grasp the changes as well as the relationship between these changes and the educational settings: there is no literature analyzing or suggesting the possible education paths able to build a different sense of citizenship for the overcoming of reproductive attitudes in a society that now needs to be innovative and construct a different interpretation of contexts and social relations. The Italian sociological observation on the subject, starting from 2006, despite coming from prestigious names (Cobalti, Schizzerotto, Baron, Ribolzi), did not produce an analysis of the educational institutions able to highlight their eventual ability to modify their functions in terms of glocalization and of the building cultures of citizenship, in the face of that trend towards crossing the boundaries between local and global that Robertson described as inevitable. The present research will investigate the civic sense of a population living in a suburban area of Naples, located in the so-called "land of fires". Our final purpose is to understand the experiences of environmental education and political participation; which social policies are suggested by the tradition; to what extent the economic growth of a region results in welfare; how education helps enhancing the sense of citizen participation, with the specific aim of improving the service sector and building a more qualified action in favor of both social enterprises and those in the cultural field