La educación patrimonial, una cuestión de futuro. Reflexiones sobre el valor del patrimonio para seguir avanzando hacia una ciudadanía crítica

Abstract

The heritage is present in the environment. He lives with him. It is there. It is consumed. It is enjoyable. It looks. However, are you aware why it is there? How did you get to the present? Who decided to keep it? And how was it done? Why does it continue to be preserved? What does it give us? What role will it have in the future? Will future generations want to respect and preserve it?
Sometimes these seemingly easy questions do not have a simple answer. Moreover, it does not formulate them or it does not raise them. However, everyone knows what heritage is, what role it has, and complains that there is no more, that no more elements are preserved.
The objective of this essay is briefly to show the evolution of the concept of heritage and its educational value in recent years, and as currently, it is intrinsically linked to education for a critical citizenship and learning for the future.
To start by saying that heritage has more of the future than of the past, sometimes it causes a certain strangeness. To affirm that, if the heritage does not have future it stops being heritage, usually it surprises. To say that, as it is ‘patrimonialized’, it can also be ‘depatrimonialized’, and that as a verb it can be conjugated in all existing times (past, present and future), it usually generates doubts.
Studying heritage is a very powerful educational strategy to learn to reflect on the construction of our identities and the decisions we make as protagonists of a society.