Multiethnic societies, educational policies, citizenship

The experience of citizenship and its formal asset have undergone changes, because of the movement of people and because of the progressive multiculturality of contemporary societies (Kymlicka, 1995; Council of Europe, 2008). Citizenship has always been at the heart of education and of the development of educational systems, both as a social task that modern society reverses on the school and as a concept that summarises the question of equal opportunities before education (Nesse Network, 2008). In the paper - through the analysis of the results of a statistical investigation carried out on a sample of 1314 Italian and foreign preadolescents attending secondary school in the Abruzzo Region (Italy) - the following topics have been considered: the question of the changing idea of citizenship and the necessity to reconsider citizenship with an expression of the universal applications of human rights with particular ones of single national facts and of single groups or people; the question of the right to be education and of the interventions that allow the full implementation of such a right. In this context, the concept of human capital is reconsidered considering two other key concepts, those of social capital and cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1980; Coleman, 1988).