OLTRE LA FAMIGLIA. PRATICHE EDUCATIVE NELLE COMUNITA' HIPPY DEGLI ANNI SETTANTA

Abstract

Between the Sixties and the Seventies a youth movement of protest spread in Italy, targeting the society and its most important institutions: the church and the family. Simultaneously together with the student movement, there was a counterculture phenomenon, the hippie movement, that wanted the death of the family and chose alternative and unregulated lifestyles as forms of challenge to parental authority. Many young people decided to flee from their families to go and live in the so-called “community”, where educational practices were experienced. They were educational practices that proposed an alternative model to the patriarchal and bourgeois family, whose authoritarian model of education was condemned. The hippie movement, also called children of flowers, created a pedagogical utopia that criticized the family for its despotic authoritarianism, for its amoral familism and for its tendency to become an emotional prison that stifled freedom of expression, creating a permanent generational conflict. In this way, the family pedagogy reflected differently on the difficult educational relationships in the family of those years.