Community and Communality. Ways Of Collective Actions of the Educational Institute

The Common Good is a powerful concept inherited from the social thought of the Catholic Church, which then moved to the democracies of the West and to the conceptions of human rights. Despite the frequent use of the term “common good”, it is not as simple and easy to understand as it seems, and in the daily life of our insti-tutions it is usually understood in two very limited ways: either as the best decision at a given moment, or as an expression of the ‘general interest’. In fact, we tend to delegate to the authorities the responsibility of the Common Good. We believe that the practice of the common pool resource, in ‘capital letters and singular’, understood as the good of each and every one of those who are part of a community, is enriched if it occurs along-side a different and complementary prac-tice: that of the common goods, in ‘small letters and plural’, because they are concrete resources that must be clearly identified. Imagining our educational institutions from the perspective of common goods transforms Educational Institutes (EI) into EI-common goods.