ABSTRACT
The teaching of industrial heritage in schools already has a long background. In the 1970s private initiatives and on-site or industrial museum learning centres provided the resources for a tuition that might not have been particularly ground-breaking but whose contents upset the balance of the traditional cultural order. Instead of focusing on a heritage founded on aesthetic values deriving from Antiquity, embedded in recognised and acclaimed artistic masterpieces, industrial heritage examined the legacy left behind by a production system, often unremarkable in itself, with few or no artistic attributes. In this case, the monument was a factory or a machine, and the artist was replaced by the engineer or mechanic. Its construction was not the result of work in a studio while the end product required the intervention of many actors.
