Responsibility, from the «me-first» Culture to Common Life. An Empirical Study With Young, Female Trainee Teachers

Abstract

What is an adult? According to Arendt an adult is a person who assumes the task of caring for the world, who takes responsibility – in the sight of younger generations – for what happens, how the world is. In global societies, where the actions of individual agents reverberate across national boundaries, does the traditional construct of political responsibility still hold water? Given the historical-cultural changes that the concept has undergone, we ask: what notion do our younger generations have of responsibility and how do they put it into practice? Is it important to them? To explore the perspectives of young people, we administered 167 questionnaires to students on the Primary Teaching degree course at the University of Verona. The experiences identified by the students as examples of responsibility relate, primarily, to their daily lives and their immediate context, while the public sphere, in a political sense, is almost entirely absent.