«Non-places» of school memory. First reflections on the forgotten places of education as generators of collective school memory: between oral history, public history and digital history

The article explores the concept of «places of memory» by analysing it from the opposite perspective of «non-places», an expression which – born in the context of the studies on the so-called «difficult heritage» and «difficult history» – was definitively popularised by the famous work of Marc Augé. By «non-places of school memory» the author means all those educational places consisting of abandoned, forgotten, or even materially no longer present schools and that, for this reason, have been removed from the collective imagination. Such places, however, still conserve an ability to generate memories that survive and resurface thanks to people who preserve what Assmann has called «communicative memory»: a collective memory that – on the contrary of formalised and institutionalised «cultural memory» – only «lives in everyday interaction and communication» and is preserved within the limited time span of three generations. Just by gathering and appropriately socialising these individual memories – a process which can be further facilitated, today, by the joint use of the methods and tools of Oral, Public and Digital History –, such Communicative memory can be transformed into Cultural memory and, consequently, a «non-place» can once more become a place of collective school memory and an identity building element for the whole community.