\u00d6sterreichischen Gesellschaft f\u00fcr V\u00f6lkerverst\u00e4ndigung and
Coudenhove-Kalergi-Stiftung Forum
Klosterneuburg, 6 March 2006<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Dear Dr. Alois Mock, Dear Dr. Josef Hoechtl, Minister Gehrer,
Excellencies,
Distinguished Guests,
Ladies and Gentlemen,<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Introduction<\/strong> European construction process, as you know, had everything to do with promoting peace among the peoples of Europe. It makes sense to build Europe and preserve peace through education. The preamble to the UNESCO Constitution puts it, Where we have come from<\/strong> When we survey where we now are in terms of education cooperation in and around the legal and political structures of the European Union, we really have to salute the vision of those people who persisted against all odds. In our own way, we are still pursuing the pathway to the future pioneered by Jean Monnet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Where we are today<\/strong> As is known, the strategy was reviewed a year ago and refocused on growth and jobs. What did not change was the stress on education and innovation as the key to reach its goals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n From the Lisbon strategy emerged two factors which are critical for our present work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Thanks to these two factors, Ministers for education agreed on an increasingly integrated policy framework which we now call \u201cEducation & Training 2010\u201d. The framework includes<\/p>\n\n\n\n The modernisation of education and training systems in Europe is already under way. The Education Council has recently reached consensus on a number of principles to foster lifelong learning:<\/p>\n\n\n\n And other initiatives like a proposed framework of key competences and a European Four essential areas of cooperation<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Let me outline four areas of cooperation which we consider essential for Europe\u2019s future: key competences, mobility, the European Qualification Framework, and higher education.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The European Institute of Technology<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The European Institute of Technology\u2014or EIT\u2014is our latest proposal to boost impact of The EIT will help turn knowledge and research into business opportunities and will promote entrepreneurship among scientists and scholars. Where we are going?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Ladies and Gentlemen: That initiative led to a report on the cultural dimension of education\u2014and especially its intercultural aspects. In helping to restore human values and personal development to their rightful place in the educational debate, Austria has, I believe, pointed the way towards the future. Conclusion<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Ladies and Gentlemen: \u00d6sterreichischen Gesellschaft f\u00fcr V\u00f6lkerverst\u00e4ndigung andCoudenhove-Kalergi-Stiftung ForumKlosterneuburg, 6 March 2006 Dear Dr. Alois Mock, Dear Dr. Josef Hoechtl, Minister Gehrer,Excellencies,Distinguished Guests,Ladies and Gentlemen, IntroductionThe conference organisers suggested that I should speak about education as the key toEurope\u2019s future. Clearly, education does, in many respects, open doors to the future.This is true at the level of the […]<\/p>","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[338],"tags":[1033,1034],"class_list":["post-18497","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-en","tag-education","tag-future"],"yoast_head":"\n
The conference organisers suggested that I should speak about education as the key to
Europe\u2019s future. Clearly, education does, in many respects, open doors to the future.
This is true at the level of the individual: schooling is a preparation for life, and even as lifelong learning is becoming accepted as the norm, we think of continuing education and training as the basis of our further personal and professional development.
At the level of the European Union, education is at the heart of the \u201cknowledge-based\u201d
Lisbon strategy for our future growth and prosperity.
But the role of education as a crucial policy area for the EU was not always taken for
granted. So, before looking at what education might hold for Europe in the future, it is useful to cast an eye back to the past, to see just how far we have already travelled.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of
peace must be constructed.
As the great nations of the European continent were cautiously pooling control of coal and steel\u2014the raw material of war at the time\u2014they were even more determined to retain control of education as a national prerogative.
After all, it has been said that compulsory education and compulsory military service were the two pillars on which the nineteenth-century nation state was built, and old habits die hard.
Jean Monnet was right to stick to the gradualist approach of making tangible progress in a limited number of areas, and building gradually on these successes.
Once the peoples of Europe had begun draw closer together through cooperation into other areas, the demand for cooperation on topics like education and culture would become irresistible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There are still many hesitations and barriers facing us in the future in regard to educational cooperation, but I take courage from our past achievements.
The Commission will shortly be publishing a history of European cooperation in the field of education, and I would warmly commend this book to you.
It traces not just the last three decades of action within the European Community context, but also the \u201cprecursor\u201d years from The Hague conference onwards, when the initial preference of countries was for the intergovernmental method.
That was an approach which gave rise to the Council of Europe and the European Cultural Convention.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Erasmus programme has become so successful that now nine out of ten universities across Europe are participating in European projects, networks or mobility actions; and close to 1.4 million students have benefited from mobility grants.
As you know, an Erasmus student spends a semester or a full academic year studying in another country.
In all, the number of people directly touched by the Socrates and Leonardo da Vinci
programmes, whether as students, as academics, as apprentices or as teachers or pupils taking part in Comenius projects, is well in excess of two million individuals.
Yet, when the Commission proposed the Erasmus programme, several of the largest
member countries opposed key elements of it on legal grounds, because they insisted that education fell outside the scope of the European Community treaties.
I might add that it was the small Member States that opened the door for Erasmus by their support for the Comett programme for vocational training at higher-education level, but difficult negotiations still lay ahead before the principle of the Erasmus programme was accepted.
Much of the argument at that time hinged on the distinction between education and
vocational training.
We could cooperate on vocational training because it was a logical consequence to the
principle of free movement of labour, which was one of the cornerstones of the common market.
But education was taboo once we called it education. It was not really until 1996, with the European Year of Lifelong Learning, that we shifted our attention from the artificial distinction between education and training to the continuum of which they both form part.
At the same time, we shifted the focus from the component parts of education and training systems, with the learner as object, to the learner as subject, taking charge of his or her lifelong learning pathway.
Even then, and still today, we had two separate Treaty articles dealing with education and vocational training, articles whose wording is in part identical.
In another thirty years\u2019 time, that distinction will surely seem strange. But, for the present, the Commission is more concerned with making tangible, concrete progress on substance than with time\u2013consuming argument on symbolic issues.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It is common to consider education in the light of the essential functions:
– development of the individual\u2019s talents and creativity,
– socialisation and civic competence,
– preparation for the world of work and
– cultural awareness and inter-cultural competence.
Today we are finally reaching a balanced view that reflects this holistic vision of education.
The breakthrough came at the Lisbon European Council in March 2000, when the European Union set itself a ten-year strategy for competitiveness, growth, employment and social cohesion. Our aim is to build knowledge-based society and
economy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
– Second, the adoption of the so-called \u201copen method of coordination\u201d, by which Member States are willing to cooperate in a non-binding way on issues which support the strategy, even if they do not fall completely within the legal framework of the Treaty.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
The cornerstone of this strategy is the recognition that investing in knowledge is vital for our future prosperity and social cohesion.
As you can see, it is again the economic argument that has enabled us to make progress.
But thanks to the open method of coordination we can take a balanced view that covers all strands of lifelong learning, from pre-school to post-retirement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
– action in the field of Vocational Education and Training (the \u201cCopenhagen process\u201d);
– the outcomes of the Bologna process in higher education.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n\n
– quality assurance;
– and guidance.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
qualifications framework are working their way through the system. We work also on e.g. a European Indicator of Language Competence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
A central objective of reforms is to equip all learners with the key competences they need to live and work in modern society, and with the capacity to learn throughout their life.
Last November the Commission proposed a Recommendation on Key Competences for Lifelong Learning. The framework includes languages, entrepreneurial initiative, cultural expression, mathematics, science and digital competence.
But it also draws attention to learning-to-learn skills as the basis of further, lifelong learning.
The proposed recommendation is a framework, a starting-point: it will still be for national education systems, and ultimately for individual teachers and learners, to breathe life into it.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n\n
Mobility<\/strong>
A fortnight ago, I had the honour of taking part in the launching of 2006 as the European Year of Workers\u2019 Mobility.
With mobility, we are on the more familiar ground of turning the Union into a single space. Part of what we are trying to achieve is a \u201cmobility culture\u201d for workers in Europe. Historically, mobility, in the form of emigration, has too often been involuntary, driven by need rather than choice.
Emigration has often been the only path open to those with few skills, but even emigration by those with skills \u2013 so-called \u201cbrain drain\u201d \u2013 has often slowed down the development of their regions of origin.
What we need to do now is equip people with the education and the breadth of vision to contemplate mobility as a normal part of their lives, but with the expectation that it may be temporary mobility.
The Irish experience of return migration in the 1990s has been an important lesson for both developed and less\u2013developed regions of the Community.
People who returned there after perhaps five or ten years abroad brought back new skills and entrepreneurial attitudes which have helped to spread economic growth more evenly.
So we need to shift our thinking from \u201cbrain drain\u201d to \u201cbrain circulation\u201d and mobility for ordinary workers as well as for top\u2013class researchers. I strongly hope we will get real support for mobility actions under the Integrated Life-long Learning Program in the next Financial Perspective 2007-13. Austrian Presidency, negotiating on behalf of the Council with the Parliament and the Commission, has important responsibility in this direction.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n\n
To promote mobility and the emergence of a true European labour market, the development of a European Qualifications Framework\u2014or EQF\u2014is also essential.
The idea I intend to present later this year is essentially a translation tool that will allow people to compare and transfer qualifications and that will serve as a basis for voluntary co operation.
The EQF will make systems and qualifications more transparent and facilitate the work of Member States, employers, trade unions and other actors.
Here I must clarify what the EQF is not: it is not a means to replace or to harmonise national qualification systems. We can\u2019t do this and we do not want to do it. The EQF is simply a reference point to facilitate communication and provide a better understanding of each other\u2019s systems and qualifications. This is why we have chosen the learning outcomes approach.
The EQF establishes the principle that it is the result of learning that matters, not where or how the learning took place. In fact, it will include formal as well as informal learning. When it is in operation, the EQF will make it easier for learners and employees to plan their lifelong learning. But for it to work, a certain degree of trust is needed. Mutual trust is the engine of our proposed framework. The system works when one country decides to relate its national qualifications to specific EQF levels and when this decision is trusted by another country.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n\n
Ladies and Gentlemen,
I left higher education for last because our universities and research centres have a major role to play to restore the European Union\u2019s world\u2013class intellectual and innovation capacity. Only a handful of our universities are mentioned in the world\u2019s most\u2013quoted international rankings.
Moreover, Europe is benefiting less than its main competitors from the increased globalisation of research and development.
The Commission identifies governance, financing and attractiveness as the crucial challenges facing European universities.
When the EU national leaders met in Hampton Court last October, they all agreed that research and the universities are crucial to the future of Europe in the world. I am now working with my colleague Janez Potocnik\u2014responsible for research and development\u2014to follow this up, and we will put forward a series of proposals for action on education, research and innovation.
The Bologna process for higher-education reform is proceeding apace, and already changing the face of higher education in Europe.
Although this cooperation process takes place outside European Union structures, the Commission is also very much involved.
It is so informal and sui generis that one cannot even call it intergovernmental; but it would have been unthinkable without the achievements of Erasmus.
I am talking not so much about instruments like transferable course credits, but rather about the climate of mutual trust which Erasmus has built up through cooperation and communication\u2014initially between individual university departments, sometimes just a handful of dedicated academics, then between universities, and gradually between national systems.
The Bologna process is now attracting increasing notice from non-European countries, whether neighbouring countries, the major industrialised nations or developing countries. With my colleagues Verheugen and Potocnik, and with the strong personal support of President Barroso, I am also working to create a European Institute of Technology.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
education in the EU; it was adopted by the Commission only two weeks ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The EIT will be a permanent and independent organisation for education, research and innovation in core strategic fields and will work through partnerships with existing universities, research centres and companies.
The principle is simple: the EIT will pool together Europe\u2019s scientific and educational
excellence and attain global visibility such as is enjoyed by only a handful of European
universities. The aim is to reach a critical mass and create a \u201cknowledge community\u201d like no other on our continent. The physical facilities will remain at the partner institutions, but the knowledge community will operate as an independent organism.
I am confident our national leaders will support the idea. When they do, we will prepare a more detailed proposal by the end of the year. At this stage, we remain open as to how the Institute is going to work in practice. If everything goes to plan, the first knowledge community would start its operations by 2009-2010.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Let me recap the two main points I\u2019ve made so far:
i) there is a new willingness to consider learning in its totality, and
ii) education is regarded as a key contribution to the construction of Europe.
These points lead to a very difficult question: what kind of a Europe do we want? What kind of values do we want education to foster, critique, and transmit?
We are not building a grand European nation or empire on the nineteenth-century model. To use the current language, I suppose one could say that the Europe which we are building is a post-modern construct.
To the extent that it has been successful in helping us heal the damage done by nationalism and the post\u20131945 settlements, it has lost one of its primary purposes and needs to reinvent itself.
But if we return to seeing it largely in economic terms, we will not mobilise our young people, and we will not meet the challenges of the future.
I recently met the new German Minister for Education Ms Anette Schavan, and was very pleased that one of the three priorities that she has identified for Germany\u2019s forthcoming presidency of the European Union is the role of education for Europe\u2019s cultural identity.
That will be a very valuable contribution to the preparation for the European Year of
Intercultural dialogue which will take place in 2008. Recent events have demonstrated the great urgency of a dialogue between cultures.
Fortunately, the growing sense of trust and shared purpose among European countries makes it possible to engage in a much more profound reflection process on what education brings in terms of values.
Austria, during a previous presidency of the European Union championed the approach \u201eBildung ist mehr\u201d.
Under this motto it advocated a more rounded approach to education than the \u201cutilitarian\u201d approach which still tends to dominate the discourse of the Lisbon strategy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Austria has also taken up a leading role in putting education for sustainable development on the agenda.
An important conference, which will take place next week in Vienna, correctly identifies sustainable development as an element of \u201cEducation for responsible global citizenship\u201d. This more visionary approach to education is the sort of thing which can inspire our young people to reflect on the issues that will set the context for their adult lives: environmental sustainability is a key element, of course, but also the ethical aspects of present patterns of world development are an essential aspect of sustainability.
It is therefore important that, in our education discourse, we do not just focus inwardly on European issues. We must also look at Europe\u2019s role in the world, and at what education can contribute to defining that role.
We need to redefine our relationship to our neighbour countries, to the major industrial nations, but also to the regions of the world which have been left behind.
This is not a task which can be left to statesmen and diplomats: we need to bring all our citizens, and especially our young citizens along with us, and only education can achieve this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I set out to talk about education as the key to Europe\u2019s future, however I realise that I have devoted rather a lot of attention to the past.
But if I did, it was to draw lessons and above all inspiration and determination for the future. If Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi\u2019s thinking was always future-oriented, it drew upon his great breadth and depth of historical knowledge.
He had the wisdom to realise that history is the high school of politics, even if historic events do not repeat themselves.
Our present European Union has not evolved in line with his vision of a Pan-Europe: but many elements of his vision of 1923 can be detected in the Union which we now have. Decisive factors of Europe\u2019s future are (1) our awareness of growing interdependence and importance of togetherness, and (2) consciousness of our shared responsibility. Better and more education is a road towards more maturity on both factors. I want to thank both the Society and the Foundation for being very active and contributing in this maturation process.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"