Oltre l’«obbligo scolastico» per i cittadini: la risposta (inattuale?) del pedagogista Rousseau.

What lies behind 'compulsory education'? And how can this 'past' be taken up in a programmatic way to build a different future? The essay does not set out to address the way in which the right-duty to education and schooling has been affirmed and realised in recent centuries in Italy and other western countries, nor does it intend to deprecate or extol the choices that have led to such an outcome over the last two centuries. According to a view that is therefore neither historical nor narrative, but which appeals to the epistemological perspective of pedagogy, it intends instead to explore the best way of placing and wanting to place, today, this right-duty to education and instruction, for the past two centuries as 'compulsory schooling', expressing, at the same time, the wish to use the achievements of modernity to realise this right to education as an opportunity for evolution that would be good to affirm. In order to do so, it is necessary to go back to Rousseau, who posed the problem to his contemporaries, confronting them with a crossroad, for which they had to take responsibility for a choice and its consequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]