Tourism, Citizenship, and Education

Abstract

Tourism is not necessarily an activity that contributes to the promotion of peace. Well-known testimonies and criticisms point out their adverse effects and consequent rejection, namely in terms of intensive occupation of territories and tampering with local cultures and identities. These harmful impacts undermine the sustainability of tourism, in its complexity (which imply a harmonious but fragile system of interdependent variables, considering the existence of open and universal hospitality) and multidimensionality (because its variables are of a different, but coherent, nature). In this context, sustainability, as necessary and vulnerable, can be easily threatened by immediate economic interests and by significant gaps in civic awareness and the exercise of citizenship by all or part of the tourism protagonists and responsible. Thus, the importance of an education that takes into account the perspective of universal solidarity, which privileges, among others, the contributions of John Dewey's “cultural criticism” and of interactive constructivism.