Think about the city, the children and their education

This paper, in the form of an essay, problematizes the child's participation in the city, investigating if its exclusion in the wider social spaces occurs because the city - the polis, as the Greeks called it - was losing the references transmitted by the past as the highest organization of human relations. It considers that the recognition of the child as a participant in the city does not mean to untie it from a social experience shared with other generational categories nor to make it hostage to an autonomy, whose self-centered childhood may well expose certain particularisms that dissociates it from a network of broader and more complex human relationships, depriving adults of their public responsibilities to those who come to the world. Dialoging, fundamentally, with Hannah Arendt's thought about what she comprehends from the Greek experience of polis, it seeks to transpose usually dominant prerogatives about children's participation in the city, drawing attention to the role of education in the understanding of the city as an experience whose legacy of cultural traditions and symbolic heritages is an important and permanent reference in the formation of the new generations.