European Identity - Individual, Group and Society - HumanitarianNet

190 EUROPEAN IDENTITY. INDIVIDUAL, GROUP AND SOCIETYdiversified contexts than to focus on abstract units (home, cities,health...). Teachers and individuals work with unique individuals andnot with arbitrary representations of any given culture: before beingArabian, African or Asian, each individual has a name and a surnameand higher individualising traits. Teachers should, thus, focus onproblem situations rather than standard situations.ConclusionWe assign schools the role of transmission of cultural and cognitivereferences that are essential for the construction of the identity ofchildren and young people attending them. Citizen education currentlyrequires helping pupils elaborate their own processes of identityconstruction in a new way. Schools still play a fundamental role in thisprocess and it is their responsibility to offer cultural, cognitive andemotional referents that can become the nucleus that agglutinates allthe disperse and unconnected stimuli children and youth are exposed to.Nowadays, Social Sciences are using the concepts of identity andcultural identity in new ways. I think this should be the starting pointfor the operative implementation of educational projects. Prior to it,the factors determining the content and the weight of the identificationof present-day Europeans as Europeans (amongst them, thecurrent ways of proceeding in European institutions, the presence of“Europeanness” in the media, the socialization and re-socializationprocesses of individuals) should be discussed. It is also necessary topreviously outline existing alternatives and to specify how educationcould contribute to strengthening them.These situations require a vast amount of creativity insofar as theycompel us to reconsider our certainties. It is the restoration of thoughtand knowledge under a new statute and a new organization. Dostoievskyhad already anticipated this task when he sententiously declared: «Ialways choose subjects that are beyond my strength».