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The programme of the cultural routes quickly took into account the fact that a privileged section of its public consisted of young Europeans. The reason is obvious: it is they who will build the Great Europe.
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But it is also they who suffer most from the progressive obliteration of the memory of the events that forged their common continent and shaped its nowadays characteristics. The portal of the Institute thus takes into account pedagogical dialogue engaged around their evolving citizenship.
loss of memory
Many European observers underlined the great political, economic and social changes that have affected Europe for the past fifty years. They were accompanied by a swing of generation, involving loss of memory on behalf of the younger generations, with regard to these transformations.
Moreover, these changes reached very different stages, depending on whether one looks at the East or the West of Europe. To give only one simple example, the experience of political totalitarianism is transmitted in France and Germany only through history books, whereas in Spain or in Portugal it can still exists with parents and grandparents, and, finally, for most of Central and Eastern Europe, even teenagers can have a concrete memory of it.
If one thinks of the landscape, the same phenomenon is perceptible. The most developed part of Europe no longer knows the traditional rural society other than from novels and ethnography works and has a view of agricultural production only through the televised image of farmers' manifestations or the aseptic presentation of supermarket aisles. On the other hand, in most of Mediterranean Europe, as well as in Central and Eastern Europe, urban families still keep strong ties with their parents who remained in rural areas. They have intact memory of the practices and the ways of life of the rural world when they do not separate their activities between the two worlds.
The establishment of collaborations between the two parts of Europe finally joined together and the meeting of younger generations born on both sides of the iron curtain thus makes it possible to clarify in a comparative, i.e. tangible, way significant concepts such as: the prevention of conflicts and racism, the transformation of rural traditional society, the passage from industrial to post-industrial society, and the transformation of landscape as work space, landscape as leisure space, or finally the compared statute of national and European citizenship...
educational and cultural encounters
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All starts from the idea that in order for Europeans to understand each other it is necessary to find common means for reading Europe. But when it comes to young Europeans the question passes obligatorily through pedagogy and meetings based on the means of finding the bases of a common citizenship.
The subjects that make possible the reconstitution of Europe in practice do exist. The pedagogy of these meetings through European courses on heritage, rereading of history books, research on places of citizenship has largely been led on the theoretical level by the Council of Europe.
What is missing, on the other hand, are places where to continue to create Europe by practising it.
The programme of the cultural routes privileged several entry ways to create occasions for meetings: religious culture, gardens and landscapes, as well as theatrical practice. Three subjects, or three very different frameworks, each of which allowing a dialogue for the rediscovery of certain specific values:
- how to understand the division of Europe into territories gathered around a religious expression and how to help them rejoin real dialogue?
- how to develop a sense of responsibility with respect to the environment, not only as "ecological obligation", but as a feeling of appartenance to a "European garden"?
- how to reread certain fundamental texts of the history of European gardens by confronting them with a multidisciplinary practice, starting from gardening to visual arts, while passing through bio sciences?
- finally, how to take into account theatrical repertory and its practice by body and voice as a common European heritage?
Various forms of meetings were worked out and pursued by the Institute, as well as many pilot projects, for which we propose a general course accompanied by practical information in the database or files: the work of students and pupils, analysis and evaluation of projects, transfers of experience...
Fortunately, the Institute is not the only organisation, although there are only a few, to open dialogue among young Europeans on the basis of cultural practice taking into account the European idea not only in the history of its institutions but also based on historical topics, places, meetings, and on the people and practices that constituted and still constitute today their substratum.
This is why we opened this domain with the presentation of the Centres of European Culture, partners and associates of the Institute which, more than ten years ago, inaugurated a really new form of meetings of young people around European citizenship.
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In addition, supporting the presentation of this experience that created a trend, there are in fact concrete elements of work carried out work, available for consultation in the database, which keeps growing richer every month.
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But we want to affirm from the outset that it is not a question of a superficial meeting. The Institute and the Centres started a common approach to the pedagogy of Europe through cultural routes, a Europe that continues thanks to young people. The goal is to design the web portal better, in dialogue with pedagogues, as well as to prepare the elements of an educational platform for distance studies aimed at the teachers in charge with the education of Europe, either by their institutions or simply by their convictions.
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