Modernity – in the West – was defined by the primacy of knowledge and rationalism. In this world of reason and science the individual was compelled to think of him or herself in terms of society, renouncing the subjective, emotional or personal. Responsibility, insofar as it was linked to the various roles the individual was called to fulfil (worker and citizen, husband and father) was ever present. The ideal ‘citizen’ put private qualities at the service of the common good (Touraine, 1993). Duty, responsibility, work ethic: these are fundamental values in the modernist society; the subjective, private world has no place.

The postmodern age, in contrast, saw the advent of the ‘subject’.  From a ‘self’ identified through social integration and participation in the collective struggle, we have moved gradually towards the affirmation of an ‘I-subject’ largely concerned with a personal, internal world (Pourtois, Desmet, 1997).

If, previously, the individual was under pressure to conform and submit to the established order, with post-modernity comes the risk of a cult of individual identity (narcissism) and the absence of norms (with the collapse of the ideologies and archetype of the patriarch, arbiter of the law).

The ideal of personal authenticity that took root in the eighteenth century (Rousseau, 1959) and emphasised the uniqueness of each individual, seems to have reached its logical extremes in contemporary society. Nourished by the myths generated by capitalism, Herder’s assertion that each individual has his or her own ‘measure’ (Herder, 1992) has filled the gaps left by the weakening of normative society: affirmation of the individual through appearance and consumption has become the norm.  We have moved from a modern age in which the private sphere was excluded from the public world, to a postmodern era in which the public sphere has been – we might say – invaded, and at times even substituted by the private. If the ‘I’ becomes a measure of itself – a notion bolstered by both the absence of norms and capitalist ideology – the construction of the locus of responsibility, from oikos to polis, has changed radically.

Against this backdrop, in which the political, socio-cultural and legislative certainties of modernity have been shaken by the advent of neo-liberalism, is it still meaningful to speak in terms of responsibility?  That authority has vanished from the modern world, as Arendt (1973) revealed, even in such ‘pre-political’ fields as pedagogy and education (1999), underlines the importance of understanding whether, and how, different educative agents (family, school, community etc.) help form a sense of personal, social and political responsibility in a society deprived of political and collective forms of authority, and what meanings might  ‘responsibility’ now take on, especially for young people.

With a view to understanding in what terms younger generations experience and understand responsibility, we have begun research that places Education, Teaching and Primary Teaching students in the role of spokespersons.  The study has three principal objectives:

      i.         investigating what forms and meanings responsibility takes on in the experience of university students;

     ii.         to learn what persons and contexts are recognised as being significant in the learning and teaching of responsibility;

   iii.         to develop a tailored educational model to promote the instillation/adoption of responsibility.

 This essentially qualitative study comprises three phases. The first, exploratory phase – presented here – seeks to validate the research tools adopted and orient the second phase, in which the investigation will be expanded to include a greater number of students. The third phase will see the development of training-action and participatory-training models designed to nurture students’ sense of responsibility in social and political settings, which can then be introduced into courses in Education.

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