Ricordare il “futuro”. Per una pedagogia dei “senza voce”

Forgetting and oblivion are human and social dimensions often activated— consciously or unconsciously—in the interplay between self-protection and the reconstruction of identity, both individual and collective. Such processes serve to preserve continuity, balance, and coherence across the life course, which seldom extends beyond the temporal horizon of one’s own existence, or at most that of one’s children and grandchildren. Yet, when these dimensions are shaped by deliberate intention, they may take on highly problematic and compromising forms. This is evident in the systematic distraction, underestimation, and active disregard of the “futures”. No majority group has been more systematically erased, colonized, and exploited by the neoliberal politico-economic logic of contemporaneity than these future generations. No majority group has been more silenced, nor does any appear more fragile and exposed to the denial of recognition and of basic rights—such as life, health, and a sustainable environment. Any commitment to a pedagogy that aspires to be a “pedagogy of the future” must therefore begin with a timely, systematic, and necessarily difficult exercise of self-critique and meta-critique. This must be grounded in an active recovery of the past and of memory—an endeavor made all the more complex by the absence of direct empirical referents, yet crucial precisely because the fate of the weakest among the weak depends on the theoretical, methodological, ethical, and practical choices made today. These “weakest” can be counted, in material terms, as billions of men and women.