Sociology and Methods of Education On Legality

The course aims to enhance the strategic importance of the processes of lawfulness education for the quality of democracies in the first part, with special reference to social systems, such as the Italian one, characterized by a high presence of corruption and organized crime. Its premise is that the fight against corruption and crime must take place by operating on a vast system of cultural, elitist or widespread complicity. And that this work, instead of being peaceful, leads to conflict with models of thought, social customs and consolidated languages. For this purpose, it selects some analytical categories of social, legal and political thought, from Machiavelli to Gramsci, from Kelsen to Bobbio or Bourdieu, from Leopardi to Pasolini or Don Milani, to understand the mechanisms that concretely hinder the processes of education and civil progress.
In its second part, the course aims to focus the functional processes for the development of the spirit of legality. On the one hand, therefore, it seeks to design the paths that, without being intentionally oriented towards the objective of legality, contribute to its construction in daily life: from the attributions of meaning and value to the development of principles of solidarity, freedom or justice. On the other hand, it contextualizes and studies, with particular reference to the Italian experience, educational, active citizenship or anti-mafia movements, which have grown especially in the youth world and which appear to be potential carriers of a new public ethic as well as a renewed theory of conflict and civil modernization.

The course aims to provide an in-depth knowledge and understanding of the weaknesses and ambiguities of the Italian "public spirit", and of their roots, as well as the historical significance of the educational and cultural processes that in different ways cooperate for the development of a more advanced ethics of legality.
The acquired knowledge and understanding aim to provide the necessary skills to recognize in one's own time the attitudes and mentalities that can positively or negatively guide the relationships between civil culture and criminal phenomena.
Critical and judgment skills are developed through comparison with numerous external witnesses, especially deepening an empirical analysis of the limits of the same experiences of education to legality.
The ability to communicate what has been learned is promoted in several ways: written papers from the very first part of the course, the final oral examination, open and continuous discussions in the classroom on specific topics, the opportunity to participate in supplementary educational paths, such as the anti-mafia journalism laboratory, or trips (with tutoring functions towards younger students) organized by the university or by the Ministry of Education, as in the case of the so-called "Falcone Ship".