Comment les enfants se représentent-ils l’Europe? Une étude sur des enfants italiens de l’école primaire

The study, that was conducted within the theoretical frame of Jean Piaget (1926) and neo-piagetians’ researches on children’s ideas about society, other nations, and economical and political institutions, investigates spontaneous notions and representations about Europe of a group of 150 Italian children living nearby Rome. The children, aged 5 to 10 years, were attending primary school and were divided in 5 groups of 30 children, corresponding to five school grades : 5-6 ; 6-7 ; 7-8 ; 8-9 ; 9-10 years. Children were individually interviewed with a flexible interview that examined their ideas about what Europe is, where Europe is, what nations are part of Europe, etc., and also their ideas about their national and/or European identity. Subjects were also asked to make a drawing of Europe. The aim of the study was to observe around what ages children were starting building a cognitive representation of a complex object as Europe, with the hypothesis that, where Europe was concerned, the same known developmental trends would be found, consisting in referring to personal experience and to nearby and known environment to give explanations and interpretations of different aspects of society. The results confirm findings of previous psychological researches on children’s thinking about society and seem to indicate that the understanding of the relations between the whole and it’s parts and the mastering of the logical operations of inclusion are preliminary conditions for a realistic assimilation of notions about Europe. Where the genesis of a European identity is concerned, our results seem to show that its construction can be started around the ages of 9-10, while younger subjects tend to refuse the idea of being « also » European.