ACADEMIA Letters Towards a Humanist Education: Understanding Cultural Heritage to Redesign the Future OLIMPIA NIGLIO, Hosei University, Tokyo, Japan Introduction What is meant today by Cultural Heritage? There are many laws dictated by diferent countries and many conventions, treaties, declarations, recommendations, and many international documents, generated mainly by or within the framework of UNESCO activities, which help us understand this defnition; however, the route is much more complex than we can imagine, because this concept has a close relationship with local cultures, and it is not possible to generalize the defnition with respect to the fve continents. In fact, for a long time, only Monuments and Art have been considered “Heritage” with capital letters. However, the material results of monuments and works of art are the product of human creativity, which is undoubtedly the frst heritage we must recognize, revalue, analyze and put at the center of our research route. This creativity is a peculiar feature of childhood, in the natural, carefree, and spontaneous way with which children observe the world and analyze what surrounds them, from the involvement of their community within their daily landscape. It is precisely this creativity that constitutes the main cultural heritage of which it is essential to start over, in order to identify a correct defnition of each cultural heritage. Within this concept of creativity there are many elements that fnd their roots throughout ancestral traditions that we cannot and should not forget or belittle. For this reason, the concept of Cultural Heritage is much broader with respect to what is generally understood by these words. Understanding cultural heritage means approaching the knowledge and valuation of communities, their history, traditions and then, the symbolic, territorial, ancestral, landscape and cultural heritage of each nation. Thus, the new way of conceiving and interpreting Cultural Heritage encompasses the social sectors because it is from there that the process of creativity begins and from the communities, we must start research on our heritage. And obviously, one of the ways in which that creativity clearly manifests itself, is in the ways in which human intervention afects natural elements, Academia Letters, August 2021 Corresponding Author: OLIMPIA NIGLIO, olimpia.niglio@gmail.com Citation: Niglio, O. (2021). Towards a Humanist Education: Understanding Cultural Heritage to Redesign the Future. Academia Letters, Article 3223. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL3223. 1 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0