Henry A. Giroux

Originally published on Truthout | License: CC Attribution-Noncommercial

Henry A. Giroux currently holds the Global TV Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department. He has taught at Boston University, Miami University of Ohio, and Penn State University. His most recent books include: The University in chains: confronting the military-industrial-academic complex (Paradigm, 2007); Against the terror of neoliberalism (Paradigm, 2008); Youth in a suspect society (Palgrave 2009). Giroux is also a member of Truthout’s Board of Directors.

Paulo Freire and Henry A. Giroux,
in Amherst, Massachusetts, 1981.

Paulo Freire is one of the most important critical educators of the 20th century. Not only is he considered one of the founders of critical pedagogy, but he also played a crucial role in developing a highly successful literacy campaign in Brazil before the onslaught of the Junta in 1964. Once the military took over the government, Freire was imprisoned for a short time for his efforts. He eventually was released and went into exile, primarily in Chile and later in Geneva, Switzerland, for a number of years. Once a semblance of democracy returned to Brazil, he went back to his country in 1980 and played a significant role in shaping its educational policies until his untimely death in 1997. His book, “Pedagogy of the Oppressed,” is considered one of the classic texts of critical pedagogy, and has sold over a million copies, influencing generations of teachers and intellectuals both in the United States and abroad. Since the 1980s, there has been no intellectual on the North American educational scene who has matched either his theoretical rigor or his moral courage. Most schools and colleges of education are now dominated by conservative ideologies, hooked on methods, slavishly wedded to instrumentalized accountability measures and run by administrators who lack either a broader vision or critical understanding of education as a force for strengthening the imagination and expanding democratic public life.

As the market-driven logic of neoliberal capitalism continues to devalue all aspects of the public good, one consequence has been that the educational concern with excellence has been removed from matters of equity, while the notion of schooling as a public good has largely been reduced to a private good. Both public and higher education are largely defined through the corporate demand that they provide the skills, knowledge and credentials that will provide the workforce necessary for the United States to compete and maintain its role as the major global economic and military power. Consequently, there is little interest in both public and higher education, and most importantly in many schools of education, for understanding pedagogy as a deeply civic, political and moral practice – that is, pedagogy as a practice for freedom. As schooling is increasingly subordinated to a corporate order, any vestige of critical education is replaced by training and the promise of economic security. Similarly, pedagogy is now subordinated to the narrow regime of teaching to the test coupled with an often harsh system of disciplinary control, both of which mutually reinforce each other. In addition, teachers are increasingly reduced to the status of technicians and deskilled as they are removed from having any control over their classrooms or school governance structures. Teaching to the test and the corporatization of education becomes a way of “taming” students and invoking modes of corporate governance in which public school teachers become deskilled and an increasing number of higher education faculty are reduced to part-time positions, constituting the new subaltern class of academic labor.

But there is more at stake here than a crisis of authority and the repression of critical thought. Too many classrooms at all levels of schooling now resemble a “dead zone,” where any vestige of critical thinking, self-reflection and imagination quickly migrate to sites outside of the school only to be mediated and corrupted by a corporate-driven media culture. The major issue now driving public schooling is how to teach for the test, while disciplining those students who because of their class and race undermine a school district’s ranking in the ethically sterile and bloodless world of high stakes testing and empirical score cards. [01] Higher education mimics this logic by reducing its public vision to the interests of capital and redefining itself largely as a credentializing factory for students and a Petri dish for downsizing academic labor. Under such circumstances, rarely do educators ask questions about how schools can prepare students to be informed citizens, nurture a civic imagination or teach them to be self-reflective about public issues and the world in which they live. As Stanley Aronowitz puts it:

“Few of even the so-called educators ask the question: What matters beyond the reading, writing, and numeracy that are presumably taught in the elementary and secondary grades? The old question of what a kid needs to become an informed ‘citizen’ capable of participating in making the large and small public decisions that affect the larger world as well as everyday life receives honorable mention but not serious consideration. These unasked questions are symptoms of a new regime of educational expectations that privileges job readiness above any other educational values.” [02]

Against this regime of “scientific” idiocy and “bare pedagogy” stripped of all critical elements of teaching and learning, Freire [03] believed that all education in the broadest sense was part of a project of freedom, and eminently political because it offered students the conditions for self-reflection, a self-managed life and particular notions of critical agency. As Aronowitz puts it in his analysis of Freire’s work on literacy and critical pedagogy:

Thus, for Freire literacy was not a means to prepare students for the world of subordinated labor or “careers,” but a preparation for a self-managed life. And self-management could only occur when people have fulfilled three goals of education: self-reflection, that is, realizing the famous poetic phrase, “know thyself,” which is an understanding of the world in which they live, in its economic, political and, equally important, its psychological dimensions. Specifically “critical” pedagogy helps the learner become aware of the forces that have hitherto ruled their lives and especially shaped their consciousness. The third goal is to help set the conditions for producing a new life, a new set of arrangements where power has been, at least in tendency, transferred to those who literally make the social world by transforming nature and themselves. [04]

What Paulo made clear in “Pedagogy of the Oppressed,” his most influential work, is that pedagogy at its best is about neither training, teaching methods nor political indoctrination. For Freire, pedagogy is not a method or an a priori technique to be imposed on all students, but a political and moral practice that provides the knowledge, skills and social relations that enable students to expand the possibilities of what it means to be critical citizens, while expanding and deepening their participation in the promise of a substantive democracy. Critical thinking for Freire was not an object lesson in test taking, but a tool for self-determination and civic engagement. For Freire, critical thinking was not about the task of simply reproducing the past and understanding the present. On the contrary, it offered a way of thinking beyond the present, soaring beyond the immediate confines of one’s experiences, entering into a critical dialogue with history and imagining a future that did not merely reproduce the present. Theodor Adorno captures the spirit of Freire’s notion of critical thinking by insisting that “Thinking is not the intellectual reproduction of what already exists anyway. As long as it doesn’t break off, thinking has a secure hold on possibility. Its insatiable aspect, its aversion to being quickly and easily satisfied, refuses the foolish wisdom of resignation…. Open thinking points beyond itself.” [05]

Freire rejected those regimes of educational degradation organized around the demands of the market, instrumentalized knowledge and the priority of training over the pursuit of the imagination, critical thinking and the teaching of freedom and social responsibility. Rather than assume the mantle of a false impartiality, Freire believed that critical pedagogy involves both the recognition that human life is conditioned not determined, and the crucial necessity of not only reading the world critically, but also intervening in the larger social order as part of the responsibility of an informed citizenry. According to Freire, the political and moral demands of pedagogy amount to more than the school and classroom being merely the instrument of official power or assuming the role of an apologist for the existing order, as the Obama administration seems to believe – given its willingness to give Bush’s reactionary educational policies a new name and a new lease on life. Freire rejected those modes of pedagogy that supported economic models and modes of agency in which freedom is reduced to consumerism and economic activity is freed from any criterion except profitability and the reproduction of a rapidly expanding mass of wasted humans. Critical pedagogy attempts to understand how power works through the production, distribution and consumption of knowledge within particular institutional contexts and seeks to constitute students as informed subjects and social agents. In this instance, the issue of how identities, values and desires are shaped in the classroom is the grounds of politics. Critical pedagogy is thus invested in both the practice of self-criticism about the values that inform teaching and a critical self-consciousness regarding what it means to equip students with analytical skills to be self-reflective about the knowledge and values they confront in classrooms. Moreover, such a pedagogy attempts not only to provide the conditions for students to understand texts and different modes of intelligibility, but also opens up new avenues for them to make better moral judgments that will enable them to assume some sense of responsibility to the other in light of those judgments.

Freire was acutely aware that what makes critical pedagogy so dangerous to ideological fundamentalists, the ruling elites, religious extremists and right-wing nationalists all over the world is that, central to its very definition, is the task of educating students to become critical agents who actively question and negotiate the relationships between theory and practice, critical analysis and common sense and learning and social change. Critical pedagogy opens up a space where students should be able to come to terms with their own power as critically engaged citizens; it provides a sphere where the unconditional freedom to question and assert is central to the purpose of public schooling and higher education, if not democracy itself. And as a political and moral practice, way of knowing and literate engagement, pedagogy attempts to “make evident the multiplicity and complexity of history.” [06] History in this sense is engaged as a narrative open to critical dialogue rather than predefined text to be memorized and accepted unquestioningly. Pedagogy in this instance provides the conditions to cultivate in students a healthy skepticism about power, a “willingness to temper any reverence for authority with a sense of critical awareness.” [07] As a performative practice, pedagogy takes as one of its goals the opportunity for students to be able to reflectively frame their own relationship to the ongoing project of an unfinished democracy. It is precisely this relationship between democracy and pedagogy that is so threatening to so many of our educational leaders and spokespersons today and it is also the reason why Freire’s work on critical pedagogy and literacy are more relevant today than when they were first published.

According to Freire, all forms of pedagogy represent a particular way of understanding society and a specific commitment to the future. Critical pedagogy, unlike dominant modes of teaching, insists that one of the fundamental tasks of educators is to make sure that the future points the way to a more socially just world, a world in which the discourses of critique and possibility in conjunction with the values of reason, freedom and equality function to alter, as part of a broader democratic project, the grounds upon which life is lived. This is hardly a prescription for political indoctrination, but it is a project that gives critical education its most valued purpose and meaning, which, in part, is “to encourage human agency, not mold it in the manner of Pygmalion.” [08] It is also a position, that threatens right-wing private advocacy groups, neoconservative politicians and conservative extremists. Such individuals and groups are keenly aware that critical pedagogy, with its emphasis on the hard work of critical analysis, moral judgments and social responsibility, goes to the very heart of what it means to address real inequalities of power at the social level and to conceive of education as a project for freedom, while at the same time foregrounding a series of important and often ignored questions such as: “What is the role of teachers and academics as public intellectuals? Whose interests does public and higher education serve? How might it be possible to understand and engage the diverse contexts in which education takes place? What is the role of education as a public good? How do we make knowledge meaningful in order to make it critical and transformative? In spite of the right-wing view that equates indoctrination with any suggestion of politics, critical pedagogy is not concerned with simply offering students new ways to think critically and act with authority as agents in the classroom; it is also concerned with providing students with the skills and knowledge necessary for them to expand their capacities both to question deep-seated assumptions and myths that legitimate the most archaic and disempowering social practices that structure every aspect of society and to then take responsibility for intervening in the world they inhabit.

Education is not neutral. It is always directive in its attempt to teach students to inhabit a particular mode of agency; enable them to understand the larger world and one’s role in it in a specific way; define their relationship, if not responsibility, to diverse others and to presuppose through what is taught and experienced in the classroom some sort of understanding of a more just, imaginative, and democratic life. Pedagogy is by definition directive, but that does not mean it is merely a form of indoctrination. On the contrary, as Freire argued, education as a practice for freedom must attempt to expand the capacities necessary for human agency and, hence, the possibilities for democracy itself. Surely, this suggests that at all levels of education from the primary school to the privileged precincts of higher education, educators should nourish those pedagogical practices that promote “a concern with keeping the forever unexhausted and unfulfilled human potential open, fighting back all attempts to foreclose and pre-empt the further unraveling of human possibilities, prodding human society to go on questioning itself and preventing that questioning from ever stalling or being declared finished.” [09] In other words, critical pedagogy forges both an expanded notion of literacy and agency through a language of skepticism, possibility and a culture of openness, debate and engagement – all those elements now at risk because of the current and most dangerous attacks on public and higher education. This was Paulo’s legacy, one that invokes dangerous memories and, hence, is increasingly absent from any discourse about current educational problems.

I first met Paulo in the early 1980s, just after I had been denied tenure by John Silber, then the notorious right-wing president of Boston University. Paulo was giving a talk at the University of Massachusetts, and he came to my house in Boston for dinner. His humility was completely at odds with his reputation and I remember being greeted with such warmth and sincerity that I felt completely at ease with him. We talked for a long time that night about his exile, my firing, what it meant to be a working-class intellectual, the risk one had to take to make a difference, and when the night was over a friendship was forged that lasted until his death 15 years later. I was in a very bad place after being denied tenure and had no idea what my future would hold for me. I am convinced that if it had not been for Freire and Donaldo Macedo, also a friend and co-author with Paulo’s, [10] I am not sure I would have stayed in the field of education. But Freire’s passion for education and Macedo’s friendship convinced me that education was not merely important, but a crucial site of struggle.

Unlike so many intellectuals I have met in academia, Paulo was always so generous, eager to publish the work of younger intellectuals, write letters of support and give as much as possible of himself in the service of others. The early eighties were exciting years in education in the US and Paulo was at the center of it. Together, we started a critical education and culture series at Bergin and Garvey and published over a hundred young authors, many of whom went on to have a significant influence in the university. Jim Bergin became Paulo’s patron as his American publisher, Donaldo became his translator and a co-author and we all took our best shots in translating, publishing and distributing Paulo’s work, always with the hope of inviting him back to the US so we could meet, talk, drink good wine and recharge the struggles that all marked us in different ways. Of course, it is difficult to write simply about Paulo as a person because who he was and how he entered one’s space and the world could never be separated from his politics. Hence, I want to try to provide a broader context for my own understanding of him as well as those ideas that consistently shaped our relationship and his relationship with others.

Occupying the often difficult space between existing politics and the as yet possible, Paulo Freire spent most of his life working in the belief that the radical elements of democracy are worth struggling for, that critical education is a basic element of social change and that how we think about politics is inseparable from how we come to understand the world, power and the moral life we aspire to lead. In many ways, Paulo embodied the important but often problematic relationship between the personal and the political. His own life was a testimonial not only to his belief in democracy, but also to the notion that one’s life had to come as close as possible to modeling the social relations and experiences that spoke to a more humane and democratic future. At the same time, Paulo never moralized about politics, never employed the discourse of shame or collapsed the political into the personal when talking about social issues. For him, private problems had to be understood in relation to larger public issues. Everything about him suggested that the first order of politics was humility, compassion and a willingness to fight against human injustices.

Freire’s belief in democracy as well as his deep and abiding faith in the ability of people to resist the weight of oppressive institutions and ideologies was forged in a spirit of struggle tempered by both the grim realities of his own imprisonment and exile, mediated by both a fierce sense of outrage and the belief that education and hope are the conditions of both agency and politics. Acutely aware that many contemporary versions of hope occupied their own corner in Disneyland, Freire fought against such appropriations and was passionate about recovering and rearticulating hope through, in his words, an “understanding of history as opportunity and not determinism.” [11] Hope for Freire was a practice of witnessing, an act of moral imagination that enabled progressive educators and others to think otherwise in order to act otherwise. Hope demanded an anchoring in transformative practices, and one of the tasks of the progressive educator was to “unveil opportunities for hope, no matter what the obstacles may be.” [12] Underlying Freire’s politics of hope was a view of radical pedagogy that located itself on the dividing lines where the relations between domination and oppression, power and powerlessness continued to be produced and reproduced. For Freire, hope as a defining element of politics and pedagogy always meant listening to and working with the poor and other subordinate groups so that they might speak and act in order to alter dominant relations of power. Whenever we talked, he never allowed himself to become cynical. He was always full of life, taking great delight in eating a good meal, listening to music, opening himself up to new experiences and engaging in dialogue with a passion that both embodied his own politics and confirmed the lived presence of others.

Committed to the specific, the play of context and the possibility inherent in what he called the unfinished nature of human beings, Freire offered no recipes for those in need of instant theoretical and political fixes. For him, pedagogy was strategic and performative: considered as part of a broader political practice for democratic change, critical pedagogy was never viewed as an a priori discourse to be reasserted or a methodology to be implemented, or for that matter a slavish attachment to knowledge that can only be quantified. On the contrary, for Freire, pedagogy was a political and performative act organized around the “instructive ambivalence of disrupted borders,” [13] a practice of bafflement, interruption, understanding and intervention that is the result of ongoing historical, social and economic struggles. I was often amazed at how patient he always was in dealing with people who wanted him to provide menu-like answers to the problems they raised about education, not realizing that they were undermining his own insistence that pedagogy could never be reduced to a method. His patience was always instructive for me and I am convinced that it was only later in my life that I was able to begin to emulate it in my own interactions with audiences.

Paulo was a cosmopolitan intellectual, who never overlooked the details in everyday life and the connections the latter had to a much broader, global world. He consistently reminded us that political struggles are won and lost in those specific yet hybridized spaces that linked narratives of everyday experience with the social gravity and material force of institutional power. Any pedagogy that called itself Freirean had to acknowledge the centrality of the particular and contingent in shaping historical contexts and political projects. Although Freire was a theoretician of radical contextualism, he also acknowledged the importance of understanding the particular and the local in relation to larger, global and cross-national forces. For Freire, literacy as a way of reading and changing the world had to be reconceived within a broader understanding of citizenship, democracy and justice that was global and transnational. Making the pedagogical more political in this case meant moving beyond the celebration of tribal mentalities and developing a praxis that foregrounded “power, history, memory, relational analysis, justice (not just representation), and ethics as the issues central to transnational democratic struggles.” [14]

But Freire’s insistence that education was about the making and changing of contexts did more than seize upon the political and pedagogic potentialities to be found across a spectrum of social sites and practices in society, which, of course, included but were not limited to the school. He also challenged the separation of culture from politics by calling attention to how diverse technologies of power work pedagogically within institutions to produce, regulate and legitimate particular forms of knowing, belonging, feeling and desiring. But Freire did not make the mistake of many of his contemporaries by conflating culture with the politics of recognition. Politics was more than a gesture of translation, representation and dialogue, it was also about creating the conditions for people to govern rather than be merely governed, capable of mobilizing social movements against the oppressive economic, racial and sexist practices put into place by colonization, global capitalism, and other oppressive structures of power.

Paulo Freire left behind a corpus of work that emerged out of a lifetime of struggle and commitment. Refusing the comfort of master narratives, Freire work was always unsettled and unsettling, restless yet engaging. Unlike so much of the politically arid and morally vacuous academic and public prose that characterizes contemporary intellectual discourse, Freire’s work was consistently fueled by a healthy moral rage over the needless oppression and suffering he witnessed throughout his life as he traveled all over the globe. Similarly, his work exhibited a vibrant and dynamic quality that allowed it to grow, refuse easy formulas and open itself to new political realities and projects. Freire’s genius was to elaborate a theory of social change and engagement that was neither vanguardist nor populist. While he had a profound faith in the ability of ordinary people to shape history and to become critical agents in shaping their own destinies, he refused to romanticize the culture and experiences that produced oppressive social conditions. Combining theoretical rigor, social relevance and moral compassion, Freire gave new meaning to the politics of daily life while affirming the importance of theory in opening up the space of critique, possibility, politics and practice. Theory and language were a site of struggle and possibility that gave experience meaning and action a political direction, and any attempt to reproduce the binarism of theory vs. politics was repeatedly condemned by Freire. [15] Freire loved theory, but he never reified it. When he talked about Freud, Marx or Erich Fromm, one could feel his intense passion for ideas. And, yet, he never treated theory as an end in itself; it was always a resource, the value of which lay in understanding, critically engaging and transforming the world as part of a larger project of freedom and justice. To say that his joy around such matters was infectious is to understate his own presence and impact on so many people that he met in his life.

I had a close personal relationship with Paulo for over 15 years, and I was always moved by the way in which his political courage and intellectual reach were matched by a love of life and generosity of spirit. The political and the personal mutually informed Freire’s life and work. He was always the curious student even as he assumed the role of a critical teacher. As he moved between the private and the public, he revealed an astonishing gift for making everyone he met feel valued. His very presence embodied what it meant to combine political struggle and moral courage, to make hope meaningful and despair unpersuasive. Paulo was vigilant in bearing witness to the individual and collective suffering of others, but shunned the role of the isolated intellectual as an existential hero who struggles alone. For Freire, intellectuals must match their call for making the pedagogical more political with an ongoing effort to build those coalitions, affiliations and social movements capable of mobilizing real power and promoting substantive social change. Freire understood quite keenly that democracy was threatened by a powerful military-industrial complex and the increased power of the warfare state, but he also recognized the pedagogical force of a corporate and militarized culture that eroded the moral and civic capacities of citizens to think beyond the common sense of official power and its legitimating ideologies. Freire never lost sight of Robert Hass’ claim that the job of education, its political job, “is to refresh the idea of justice going dead in us all the time.” [16]

At a time when education has become one of the official sites of conformity, disempowerment and uncompromising modes of punishment, the legacy of Paulo Freire’s work is more important than ever before.

_________
01. On the issue of containment and the pedagogy of punishment, see: Jenny Fisher, “The Walking Wounded: The Crisis of Youth, School Violence, and Precarious Pedagogy, Review of Education, Cultural Studies, and Pedagogy” (in press). ↑
02. Stanley Aronowitz, “Against Schooling: For an Education That Matters,” (Boulder, Colorado: Paradigm Publishers, 2008), p. xii. ↑
03. One of the best sources on the life and work of Paulo Freire is Peter Mayo, “Liberating Praxis: Freire’s Legacy for Radical Education and Politics” (Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2008). Two of the best translators of Freire’s work to the American context are Donaldo Macedo, “Literacies of Power” (Boulder: Westview, 1994) and Ira Shor, “Freire for the Classroom” (Portsmouth, New Hampshire: Boynton/Cook, 1987). ↑
04. Stanley Aronowitz, “Forward,” “Critical Pedagogy in Uncertain Times: Hope and Possibilities,” ed. Sheila L. Macrine, (New York, New York, Palgrave MacMillan, 2009) pp. ix. ↑
05. Theodor Adorno, “Education after Auschwitz,” “Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords” (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 291-292. ↑
06. Edward Said, “Reflections on Exile and Other Essays” (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 141. ↑
07. Ibid, Edward Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, p. 501. ↑
08. Stanley Aronowitz, “Introduction,” in “Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom” (Boulder: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998), pp. 10 – 11. ↑
09. Zygmunt Bauman and Keith Tester, “Conversations With Zygmunt Bauman” (Malden: Polity Press, 2001), p. 4. ↑
10. See Paulo Freire and Donaldo Macedo, “Literacy: Reading the Word and the World” (Amherst, Massachusetts: Bergin and Garvey, 1987). ↑
11. Paulo Freire, “Pedagogy of Hope” (New York: Continuum Press, 1994), p. 91. ↑
12. Ibid., p. 9. ↑
13. Cited in Homi Bhabha, “The Enchantment of Art,” Carol Becker and Ann Wiens, eds. “The Artist in Society” (Chicago: New Art Examiner, 1994), p. 28. ↑
14. M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Introduction: Genealogies, Legacies, Movements,” J. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Mohanty, eds. “Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures” (New York: Routledge, 1997), p. xix. ↑
15. Surely, Freire would have agreed wholeheartedly with Stuart Hall’s insight that: “It is only through the way in which we represent and imagine ourselves that we come to know how we are constituted and who we are. There is no escape from the politics of representation.” Stuart Hall, “What is this ‘Black’ in Popular Culture?” in Gina Dent, ed. “Black Popular Culture” (Seattle: Bay Press, 1992), pp. 30. ↑
16. Robert Hass cited in Sarah Pollock, “Robert Hass,” Mother Jones (March/April, 1992), p. 22. ↑

The Manifesto is one of the key outcomes of the European Year and comes with the ambition to shape the European Union’s strategy for promoting creativity and innovation during the next decade. At the handing over ceremony, Commission President Barroso reconfirmed that the Manifesto will inform and feed into the coming EU2020 strategy.

At the time of writing, the Manifesto was available as a pdf-document only, so we wanted to make it fully available online – also out of curiosity what reactions you might have to the ideas outlined in the document.

Some of the guiding questions, as phrased by the European Commisson, were:

How can Europe be at the forefront of the new, globalised, intensely competitive and knowl­edge-based world of the 21st century? How can the creative and innovative potential of Europe be better used in education, research, culture, design, business and the work­place? How can public policy at the European and national levels foster creativity and inno­vation in these fields?

Update: A little bit of additional context: “The manifesto is largely the product of six debates in Brussels this year on key topics surrounding creativity and innovation.” (Source)

Below is the entire Manifesto preceded by an overview of the 27 ambassadors, a group of “leading European personalities from the fields of culture, science, business, education and design” – hover over the image to see who is who, or click on the image to read the profiles at the website of the European Year.

European Ambassadors for Creativity and Innovation

Manifesto for Creativity and Innovation [pdf]

The world is moving to a new rhythm. To be at the forefront of this new world, Europe needs to become more creative and innovative. To be creative means to imagine something that didn’t exist before and to look for new solutions and forms. To be innovative means to introduce change in society and in the economy. Design activities transform ideas into value and link creativity to innovation.

In order to progress, Europe needs increased investment – both private and public – in knowledge. Moving ahead with wisdom requires respect for history and the cultural heritage. New knowledge builds upon historical knowledge, and most innovations are new combinations of what is already there. Culture, with its respect for individual and collective memory, is important to maintaining a sense of direction in the current context of restless change.

Creativity is a fundamental dimension of human activity. It thrives where there is dialogue between cultures, in a free, open and diverse environment with social and gender equality. It requires respect and legal protection for the outcomes of creative and intellectual work. Creativity is at the heart of culture, design and innovation, but everyone has the right to utilise their creative talent. More than ever, Europe’s future depends on the imagination and creativity of its people.

The economic, environmental and social crises challenge us to find new ways of thinking and acting. Creativity and innovation can move society forward toward prosperity, but society needs to take responsibility for how they are used. Today, they must be mobilised in favour of a fair and green society, based upon intercultural dialogue and with respect for nature and for the health and well-being of people worldwide.

To create a more creative and innovative Europe, open to the rest of the world and respectful of human values, we present the following manifesto, which sets out our priorities and our recommendations for action. The need for change and a new initiative is urgent. Europe and its Member States must give full attention to creativity and innovation now in order to find a way out of the current stalemate.

Manifesto

1. Nurture creativity in a lifelong learning process where theory and practice go hand in hand.
2. Make schools and universities places where students and teachers engage in creative thinking and learning by doing.
3. Transform workplaces into learning sites.
4. Promote a strong, independent and diverse cultural sector that can sustain intercultural dialogue.
5. Promote scientific research to understand the world, improve people’s lives and stimulate innovation.
6. Promote design processes, thinking and tools, understanding the needs, emotions, aspirations and abilities of users.
7. Support business innovation that contributes to prosperity and sustainability.

Lines of action

The following lines of action require a new understanding of public policy. The European Commission and national Governments need to engage in change together with social partners and grass-root movements. Shared visions and initiatives that cross traditional policy areas are needed in order to deal with current ecological, social, cultural, security and democratic deficits. Focusing upon creativity and innovation is a key to opening dialogues that cross historical political divides.

Action 1: Invest in knowledge
In order to strengthen the competitiveness of Europe, new budgetary principles that give high priority to investments in people and knowledge are necessary. In the short term, unemployed workers should be offered a chance to upgrade their skills. Business, trade unions and governments should work together in organising the upgrading of workers’ skills through public and private funding. The scale and ambition of the European Structural Funds must be expanded, be focused upon investment in research and knowledge and linked to building institutional frameworks that support learning in working life.

Action 2: Reinvent education
Schools and universities need to be reinvented in partnership with teachers and students so that education prepares people for the learning society. Retrain teachers and engage parents so that they can contribute to an education system that develops the necessary knowledge, skills and attitudes for intercultural dialogue, critical thinking, problem-solving and creative projects. Give a strong emphasis to design in education at different levels. Establish a major European-wide research and development effort on education to improve quality and creativity at all levels.

Action 3: Reward initiative
People that take new initiatives in business, the public sector and civic society should be rewarded. Social policies can contribute to innovation by sharing risks with citizens who engage in change. Artists, designers, scientists and entrepreneurs who contribute with new ideas should be rewarded. Prizes for excellence should be combined with legal protection of intellectual property rights and strike a balance between creating fair rewards and promoting knowledge-sharing.

Action 4: Sustain culture
Capacity-building in the cultural sector should be supported through national and European programmes and mechanisms in order to sustain cultural diversity, independence and intercultural dialogue. Creative industries should be promoted by building new bridges between art, philosophy, science and business. The development and use of new media should be stimulated through raising the quality of the content. New economic models must be developed to finance free, diverse, independent and high-quality digital news media.

Action 5: Promote innovation
There is a need for a more ambitious and broad-based innovation policy. Increased investment in science, technology and design should be combined with efforts to increase the demand for knowledge. Firms should be stimulated to combine scientific knowledge with experience-based knowledge. They should be encouraged to increase diversity among employees in terms of gender, education and nationality. The education of engineers, managers and designers should mix theoretical education with practical experience. Innovation policy as well as labour market and education policy should aim at mobilising users and employees in processes of change. Developing and implementing broad innovation policy strategies must be a major concern for political leaders.

Action 6: Think globally
Europe should be at the world-wide forefront in terms of science, culture and competitiveness. Collaboration within Europe in science, technology, education, design and culture needs to be further opened up to the rest of the world. A competitive Europe should develop economic collaboration both with the strong new emerging economies and with the poor countries most in need of support. Promoting innovation in poor countries is a moral obligation and it reduces the pressure of immigration. Europe should contribute to the establishment of fair rules regarding the protection and sharing of knowledge at the global level.

Action 7: Green the economy
Europe must mobilise creativity and innovation to transform itself into a post-carbon society. A key element is eco-innovation and the establishment of a ‘new techno- economic trajectory’ starting from ‘end of pipe’ solutions, moving through ‘clean technologies’ and ending with ‘system innovations’ that radically transform production, distribution and consumption. Investments need to be combined with new institutions, new regulation and new habits. Creativity is the major tool to find solutions that combine sustainability with prosperity.

My fellow citizens:

I stand here today humbled by the task before us, grateful for the trust you have bestowed, mindful of the sacrifices borne by our ancestors. I thank President Bush for his service to our nation, as well as the generosity and cooperation he has shown throughout this transition.

Forty-four Americans have now taken the presidential oath. The words have been spoken during rising tides of prosperity and the still waters of peace. Yet, every so often the oath is taken amidst gathering clouds and raging storms. At these moments, America has carried on not simply because of the skill or vision of those in high office, but because We the People have remained faithful to the ideals of our forbearers, and true to our founding documents.

So it has been. So it must be with this generation of Americans.

That we are in the midst of crisis is now well understood. Our nation is at war, against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred. Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some, but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age. Homes have been lost; jobs shed; businesses shuttered. Our health care is too costly; our schools fail too many; and each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet.

These are the indicators of crisis, subject to data and statistics. Less measurable but no less profound is a sapping of confidence across our land – a nagging fear that America’s decline is inevitable, and that the next generation must lower its sights.

Today I say to you that the challenges we face are real. They are serious and they are many. They will not be met easily or in a short span of time. But know this, America – they will be met.

On this day, we gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord.

On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn out dogmas, that for far too long have strangled our politics.

We remain a young nation, but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things. The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history; to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea, passed on from generation to generation: the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness.

In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of short-cuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted – for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame. Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things – some celebrated but more often men and women obscure in their labor, who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.

For us, they packed up their few worldly possessions and traveled across oceans in search of a new life.

For us, they toiled in sweatshops and settled the West; endured the lash of the whip and plowed the hard earth.

For us, they fought and died, in places like Concord and Gettysburg; Normandy and Khe Sahn.

Time and again these men and women struggled and sacrificed and worked till their hands were raw so that we might live a better life. They saw America as bigger than the sum of our individual ambitions; greater than all the differences of birth or wealth or faction.

This is the journey we continue today. We remain the most prosperous, powerful nation on Earth. Our workers are no less productive than when this crisis began. Our minds are no less inventive, our goods and services no less needed than they were last week or last month or last year. Our capacity remains undiminished. But our time of standing pat, of protecting narrow interests and putting off unpleasant decisions – that time has surely passed. Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America.

For everywhere we look, there is work to be done. The state of the economy calls for action, bold and swift, and we will act – not only to create new jobs, but to lay a new foundation for growth. We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together. We will restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology’s wonders to raise health care’s quality and lower its cost. We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age. All this we can do. And all this we will do.

Now, there are some who question the scale of our ambitions – who suggest that our system cannot tolerate too many big plans. Their memories are short. For they have forgotten what this country has already done; what free men and women can achieve when imagination is joined to common purpose, and necessity to courage.

What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them – that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply. The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works – whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified. Where the answer is yes, we intend to move forward. Where the answer is no, programs will end. And those of us who manage the public’s dollars will be held to account – to spend wisely, reform bad habits, and do our business in the light of day – because only then can we restore the vital trust between a people and their government.

Nor is the question before us whether the market is a force for good or ill. Its power to generate wealth and expand freedom is unmatched, but this crisis has reminded us that without a watchful eye, the market can spin out of control – and that a nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous. The success of our economy has always depended not just on the size of our Gross Domestic Product, but on the reach of our prosperity; on our ability to extend opportunity to every willing heart – not out of charity, but because it is the surest route to our common good.

As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our Founding Fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience’s sake. And so to all other peoples and governments who are watching today, from the grandest capitals to the small village where my father was born: know that America is a friend of each nation and every man, woman, and child who seeks a future of peace and dignity, and that we are ready to lead once more.

Recall that earlier generations faced down fascism and communism not just with missiles and tanks, but with sturdy alliances and enduring convictions. They understood that our power alone cannot protect us, nor does it entitle us to do as we please. Instead, they knew that our power grows through its prudent use; our security emanates from the justness of our cause, the force of our example, the tempering qualities of humility and restraint.

We are the keepers of this legacy. Guided by these principles once more, we can meet those new threats that demand even greater effort – even greater cooperation and understanding between nations. We will begin to responsibly leave Iraq to its people, and forge a hard-earned peace in Afghanistan. With old friends and former foes, we will work tirelessly to lessen the nuclear threat, and roll back the specter of a warming planet. We will not apologize for our way of life, nor will we waver in its defense, and for those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents, we say to you now that our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken; you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you.

For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus – and non-believers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth; and because we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation, and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united, we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself; and that America must play its role in ushering in a new era of peace.

To the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect. To those leaders around the globe who seek to sow conflict, or blame their society’s ills on the West – know that your people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy. To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history; but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.

To the people of poor nations, we pledge to work alongside you to make your farms flourish and let clean waters flow; to nourish starved bodies and feed hungry minds. And to those nations like ours that enjoy relative plenty, we say we can no longer afford indifference to suffering outside our borders; nor can we consume the world’s resources without regard to effect. For the world has changed, and we must change with it.

As we consider the road that unfolds before us, we remember with humble gratitude those brave Americans who, at this very hour, patrol far-off deserts and distant mountains. They have something to tell us today, just as the fallen heroes who lie in Arlington whisper through the ages. We honor them not only because they are guardians of our liberty, but because they embody the spirit of service; a willingness to find meaning in something greater than themselves. And yet, at this moment – a moment that will define a generation – it is precisely this spirit that must inhabit us all.

For as much as government can do and must do, it is ultimately the faith and determination of the American people upon which this nation relies. It is the kindness to take in a stranger when the levees break, the selflessness of workers who would rather cut their hours than see a friend lose their job which sees us through our darkest hours. It is the firefighter’s courage to storm a stairway filled with smoke, but also a parent’s willingness to nurture a child, that finally decides our fate.

Our challenges may be new. The instruments with which we meet them may be new. But those values upon which our success depends – hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism – these things are old. These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history. What is demanded then is a return to these truths. What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility – a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task.

This is the price and the promise of citizenship.

This is the source of our confidence – the knowledge that God calls on us to shape an uncertain destiny.

This is the meaning of our liberty and our creed – why men and women and children of every race and every faith can join in celebration across this magnificent mall, and why a man whose father less than sixty years ago might not have been served at a local restaurant can now stand before you to take a most sacred oath.

So let us mark this day with remembrance, of who we are and how far we have traveled. In the year of America’s birth, in the coldest of months, a small band of patriots huddled by dying campfires on the shores of an icy river. The capital was abandoned. The enemy was advancing. The snow was stained with blood. At a moment when the outcome of our revolution was most in doubt, the father of our nation ordered these words be read to the people:

“Let it be told to the future world…that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive…that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet [it].“

America. In the face of our common dangers, in this winter of our hardship, let us remember these timeless words. With hope and virtue, let us brave once more the icy currents, and endure what storms may come. Let it be said by our children’s children that when we were tested we refused to let this journey end, that we did not turn back nor did we falter; and with eyes fixed on the horizon and God’s grace upon us, we carried forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it safely to future generations.

Reported by the Onion, America’s finest news source:

WASHINGTON—African-American man Barack Obama, 47, was given the least-desirable job in the entire country Tuesday when he was elected president of the United States of America. In his new high-stress, low-reward position, Obama will be charged with such tasks as completely overhauling the nation’s broken-down economy, repairing the crumbling infrastructure, and generally having to please more than 300 million Americans and cater to their every whim on a daily basis.

As part of his duties, the black man will have to spend four to eight years cleaning up the messes other people left behind. The job comes with such intense scrutiny and so certain a guarantee of failure that only one other person even bothered applying for it. Said scholar and activist Mark L. Denton, “It just goes to show you that, in this country, a black man still can’t catch a break.”

To look at the results of this landslide election in detail, I recommend the New York Times Election Map, easily the best election map available this time (screenshots below).

Graphic: screenshot from nyt.com. Illustration by Patrick Moberg.

The answer is related to evaluation studies, to obscene workloads, to mobbing madness, and to this book.

It is here.

In case you ordered your copy already — good for us, and good for you, because the book is on its way. We shipped the whole load during the past days, and we are confident that you will enjoy the book soon.

In case you haven’t ordered your copy yet — do so before October 20, when we will send the second edition to the printers because the first print is practically sold out.

Thanks for staying with us!

Sincerely,

Peter Lauritzen was a good dancer,
and he had extraordinary vision…

His thoughts flew high and free, he never lost sight of the horizon, but he could always pinpoint the prey of the moment.

In this contribution, I want to think about Peter’s horizons and what they mean for youth research in Europe in the dance into which he led so many of us during the thirty-five years or so between the foundation of the European Youth Centre in Strasbourg and the broaching of his own last horizon.

Will you join the dance?»

These lines were written by Lynne Chisholm in her contribution «Where eagles dare to fly» to the book «Born in Flensburg, Europe”, a Festschrift in honour of Peter Lauritzen that will be published soon. Find out more, and order the book at http://www.nonformality.org/journeys.

It’s a bit of a yawn, I admit… A real snoozer.

(Bland. Stale. Unagitated. Twittery. Unglamorous. Insipid. Flat. Dull. Banausic. Ghastly. Call it what you want.)

Yet, not all is quite for the birds.

I was just strolling around my inbox to confirm that the past year has been particularly concerned with bureaucracies. Of any kind, really: from universities or schools to city administrations, and European, even world-wide organisations of any kind; the White House and non-governmental associations included.

This, then, must be an appropriate moment to dig deep in the past of humanity and re-introduce some crucial thinking on bureaucracy along the principles of Peter and Dilbert.

(If you don’t like Dilbert, or Peter, go here. If you like Dilbert and know his principle as well as Peter’s, get your mind boggled. If you don’t know Dilbert, descend into the eternal grounds and go here and here before you return.)

Bureaucracy is a sociological concept often associated with public administration, even though it describes a hierarchical form of organising the execution and enforcement of rules that is also widely applied in economy, civil society, religion and elsewhere.

The word has its etymological roots in the French «bureau», referring to a public office, and the Greek «kratos», meaning «power» or «rule», and basically means «office rule» or «official power». Already in 18th-century France discourses — that we know all too well from our days — existed:

«We have an illness in France which bids fair to play havoc with us; this illness is called bureaumania».

Jean Claude Marie Vincent de Gournay, French economist (1712-1759)

Gournay is considered one of the first major critics of bureaucracies which he often referred to as the fourth or fifth form of government. Since then, the controversy about bureaucracy has mainly remained the same in suggesting that, left uncontrolled and unchecked, bureaucracies are bound to become increasingly perverse, corrupt and self-serving, rather than serving society and the common good.

«[...] indeed the public interest appears to have been established so that offices might exist.»

Friedrich Melchior Baron von Grimm, German writer and diplomat (1723-1807)

Until today, the connotation of «bureaucracy» is overwhelmingly negative — who wants to be called a «bureaucrat»? Administrator, civil servant, public servant, city clerk, director general: yes, bureaucrat: never!

Bureaucracies are condemned as (choose your own set): anti-liberal, undemocratic, totalitarian, hostile to liberty, paralysing, inefficient, wasteful, unfriendly, unethical, unfair, overly complicated, pedantic, rigid, slow and slack. And who hasn’t encountered an unjust ruling of administration, based on a rule that makes little or no sense? Yet:

«Such rules are indispensable if public administration is not to slip out of the hands of the top executives and degenerate into the supremacy of subordinate clerks.»

Mises, L. (1944): Bureaucracy. University Press, Yale. Page 126. (pdf)

This is what Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises in 1944 suggested, a claim vividly supported by Günter Verheugen not too long ago.

But what are bureaucracies?

According to Merriam-Webster, bureaucracy means

«1: a) a body of nonelective government officials
1: b) an administrative policy-making group
2: government characterized by specialization of functions, adherence to fixed rules, and a hierarchy of authority
3: a system of administration marked by officialism, red tape, and proliferation.»

BTW: MW claims that «cratie» stands for «cracy»

In contrast, have a look at the definition provided by MSN Encarta (in particular point 4):

«1. administrative system: an administrative system, especially in a government, that divides work into specific categories carried out by special departments of nonelected officials
2. officials collectively: the nonelected officials of an organization or department
3. state or organization: a state or organization operated by a hierarchy of paid officials
4. frustrating rules: complex rules and regulations applied rigidly»

Karl Marx suggested that bureaucracy controls, co-ordinates and governs the development, production, distribution and consumption of wealth and is maintained by the surplus of such wealth production. It has, in other words, very little interest in changing the system it protects and is protected by (a problem seemingly rising to the surface of modern discourses).

Max Weber has studied the sociology of politics and government and in particular the bureaucratisation of society extensively and described the ideal bureaucracy by a set of seven conditions, which are:

1. official business is conducted on a continuous basis
2. official business is conducted with strict accordance to the following rules:
• the duty of each official to do certain types of work is delimited in terms of impersonal criteria
• the official is given the authority necessary to carry out his assigned functions
• the means of coercion at his disposal are strictly limited and conditions of their use strictly defined
3. every official’s responsibilities and authority are part of a vertical hierarchy of authority, with respective rights of supervision and appeal
4. officials do not own the resources necessary for the performance of their assigned functions but are accountable for their use of these resources
5. official and private business and income are strictly separated
6. offices cannot be appropriated by their incumbents (inherited, sold, etc.)
7. official business is conducted on the basis of written documents

Criticism of these principles are wide-ranging and suggest that, crucially, real bureaucracies could never be as ideal as Weber’s model and thus it is not adequate to describe bureaucracies with all their problems ranging from conflicts of competence, unclear responsibilities, impersonalisation of staff, corruption, nepotism, oligarchic behaviours, overspecialisation, missing flexibility to deal with exceptions, lack of critical thinking, zealotry… to name but a few.

To many, the (mis-) interpretation of Weber’s thinking in the development of modern public service has led to a Catch-22: As bureaucracy creates more and more simplistic rules to deal with new or different situations one-dimensionally, very legalistically and with little common sense, the complexity of the spiderweb of rules increases without the capacity to deal with the rising complexity of reality at all — consequently, coordination and overview diminish, contradictory rules develop, and essentially administration becomes chaotic, arbitrary and discriminating.

So let’s have a look inside this system of bureaucracy at the people who work there:

According to Weber, a bureaucratic official is personally free and appointed to his position on the basis of conduct; exercises the authority delegated to him in accordance with impersonal rules; enlists his loyalty on behalf of the faithful execution of his official duties; is appointed and placed dependent upon his technical qualifications; does administrative work as a full-time occupation which is rewarded by a regular salary and prospects of advancement in a lifetime career.

An official must exercise his judgment and his skills, but his duty is to place these at the service of a higher authority.

(Source)

In 1968, the hierarchiologist Peter Laurence formulated the «Peter Principle»:

«In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.»

Peter, Laurence and Hull, Raymond (1968): The Peter Principle: Why things always go wrong. Souvenir Press, London: Reprint 1994.

This principle has been widely quoted and satirised, and often been misunderstood: Peter and Hull are not suggesting that every civil servant is incompetent. They are merely claiming that due to the wide-spread practice of promotion based on success in the current (soon: previous) task, people tend to get stuck in positions for which they are not fully competent any more. After some time, this principle leads to a «Hierarchy of the Incompetent» — if you leave all other processes and influences on promotions and positions aside (some of which may speed up this process, others delay it).

With the «Peter Pyramid», Peter continued his work by expanding the «Peter Principle» (which applies to individuals in bureaucracies) to organisations and the system itself. (Peter, Laurence (1986): The Peter Pyramid: Or, Will We Ever Get the Point? William Morrow & Company, New York.)

Related to the work of Peter and Hull is the thinking of the German sociologist Robert Michels who invented the «Iron Law of Oligarchy» by observing that «all forms of organization, regardless of how democratic or autocratic they may be at the start, will eventually and inevitably develop into oligarchies.» In consequence, Michels claims, large organisations and democracy are incompatible. The now dysfunct «International Typographical Union» is one of the few (apparent) exceptions to this iron rule.

Scott Adams took a combination of the «Peter Principle» and the «Iron Law of Oligarchy» one step further and invented the «Dilbert Principle» which suggests that:

«Companies tend to systematically promote their least-competent employees to management, in order to limit the amount of damage that they’re capable of doing.»

Adams, Scott (1996): The Dilbert Principle. Harper Business, New York.

Clearly: BOCTAOE! Yet: How many examples do you know?

According to my inbox: too many.

∞

While Colley, Hodkinson and Malcom have pointed out in their 2003 research report «Informality and Formality in Learning» that the term may have been used in a Unesco report already in 1947 (at least Hamadache claimed so in 1991 without a clear reference), it is certainly true that Coombs delivered the first substantial and comprehensive description of non-formal education – and also the first plead to substantially strengthen non-formal education in the Western World, as you can see on the back side of his 1968 book:

Having said this, let’s consider — just for a brief moment — the history of education in a slightly longer perspective in the words of Helen Colley and her colleagues:

Non-formal education has its roots in practices which considerably pre-date state elementar education.

(Colley, Hodkinson and Malcom (2003): Informality and Formality in Learning. Lifelong Learning Institute, Leeds. Page 18).

In other words: Learning has, for the majority of human history, been informal and non-formal to begin with; the word education comes from the Latin educare meaning “to raise”, “to bring up”, “to train”. Obligatory schooling in formal education institutions is a concept which can be traced back to merely the 18th century and has gained decisive momentum with the industrial revolution and the arising need to train many people quickly. So let’s not forget that context when looking back at 1968!

(Btw: The first country to introduce formal and obligatory education was Liechtenstein. They introduced it at national level in 1805.)

Philip Hall Coombs died in February 2006, but his works on education remain provocative, challenging and relevant to date. Before you finally go on to read one of his writings, the historic chapter

«Nonformal Education: To Catch Up, Keep Up, and Get Ahead»

of his book ‘The World Educational Crisis: A Systems Perspective’, let’s just stick for another brief moment with the historical context of his thinking. At the time, the feeling grew that education was failing everywhere in the world – formal education systems did not prepare people for life-long learning in the Western world, and provided no quick solution to the problem of illiteracy in the developing world either.

The following quote of Coombs makes this clear:

The assumption is that the educational system will produce the kinds and amounts of human resources required for the economy’s growth, and that the economy will in fact make good use of these resources. But suppose the opposite happens? Suppose the educational system turns out the wrong ’mix’ of manpower? Or suppose it turns out the right mix, but the economy does not use it well? What then? Doubts then arise about education’s productivity and the efficacy of the investment made in it.

(Coombs, Philip (1968): The World Educational Crisis: A Systems Perspective. University Press, Oxford. Quoted in: UNESCO (1996): 50 years for Education. Unesco, Paris. Page 64)

And Coombs was not alone with his questions and concerns: Others like Ivan Illich also voiced fundamental criticism:

Many students (…) intuitively know what the schools do for them. They school them to confuse process and substance. Once these become blurred, a new logic is assumed: the more treatment there is, the better are the results; or, escalation leads to success. The pupil is thereby “schooled” to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. His imagination is “schooled” to accept service in place of value.

(Illich, Ivan (1973): Deschooling Society. Penguin, Harmondsworth. Quoted in: Smith, M. K. (2001): Ivan Illich: deschooling, conviviality and the possibilities for informal education and lifelong learning. The encyclopedia of informal education.)

So it was in this phase of fundamental criticism and the hopeful belief that non-formal education would turn out to be a solution for many of schooling’s problems, that Philip Coombs wrote his book, of which we present you an excerpt of his chapter on non-formal education (The text is original but re-typed and any typos are exclusively mine. The quotes are ours to illustrate the text and make it more readable on screen):

Nonformal Education: To Catch Up, Keep Up, and Get Ahead

Up to this point we have made only occasional reference to that bewildering assortment of nonformal education and training activities that constitute – or should constitute – an important complement to formal education in any nation’s total education effort. These activities go by different names – ‘adult education,’ ‘continuing education,’ ‘on-the-job training,’ ‘accelerated training,’ ‘farmer or worker training,’ and ‘extension services.’ They touch the lives of many people and, when well aimed, have a high potential for contributing quickly and substantially to individual and national development. They can also contribute much to cultural enrichment and to individual self-realization.

There is, therefore, a wide general agreement that this shadowy ‘other system’ of education is important and warrants greater attention. Yet one gathers from the scanty evidence that the many bold words about the matter have seldom been matched by equally bold deeds. One evident reason for this is that in contrast to the relative neatness and coherence of the formal education system, Nonformal educational activities are an untidy mélange that defies simple description, or the diagnosis and measurement of systematic planning. Few nations have even a moderately good inventory of their present activities in this realm, much less an assessment of future needs and how best to meet them.

The aims of these activities are often unclear, their clienteles undefined, and responsibility for their management and funding scattered across dozens of public and private agencies. They spring up spontaneously, come and go, at times succeed brilliantly but just as often die unnoticed and unmourned. Nobody in particular is in charge of monitoring them, of keeping their evolving pattern in over-all perspective, of identifying gaps that need filling and projecting future requirements, or of suggesting priorities and better ways of harmonizing them and boosting their efficiency and effectiveness.

The matter is further beclouded if one fails to distinguish clearly between the needs for nonformal education of the more industrialized countries and those of the less advanced ones.

The industrialized countries of Europe and North America have increasingly come to recognize that formal education – to whatever level – must be followed by appropriate forms of ‘continuing education’ throughout each person’s life. Life-long education is essential in a rapidly progressing and changing society for three primary reasons: (1) to ensure the employment mobility of individuals, and to make unemployable ‘drop-outs’ of the past employable; (2) to keep already well-trained people abreast of new knowledge and technologies essential to their continued high productivity in their respective fields; and (3) to improve the quality and satisfaction of individual lives through culturally enriching their expanding leisure time. In this perspective, the continuing education of teachers, at all levels, is of special strategic significance; if they fail to keep up with the frontiers of knowledge they will be giving yesterday’s education to tomorrow’s citizens.

In response to these several requirements, there has evolved very rapidly in most industrialized countries an astonishing network of ‘continuing education’ programs. It is entirely possible that in some countries (e.g. the United States and the Soviet Union) the aggregate of economic resources and human energies already committed to these part-time programs approaches the total involved in full-time formal education.

The full truth of the matter here is unknown, but an effort by Professor Harold Clark of Columbia University to take stock of the situation in the United States led to some startling conclusions. He found that, in addition to the ‘formal’ education system, there were at least three ‘informal’ educational systems, largely hidden from view but extensively engaged in teaching many of the same things. One was run by private business, a second by the military establishment, and the third embraced a motley assortment of educational activities sponsored by private voluntary organizations.

Some giant industrial firms, as nearly as Professor Clark could calculate (the accounting records are never clear on these matters), were spending about as much on the high-level training of their employees and customers as the instructional budgets of some of the nation’s largest universities – often on the very same subjects. He found also that the amount of ‘Sunday school’ space in the churches of some communities equalled the classroom space of local public schools. An incidental discovery he made was that private yacht clubs were giving the same navigation courses as the Naval Academy at Annapolis, and that their students often did better than the future naval officers in the same examinations. The military services, on the other hand, were providing such good civilian technical training to military personnel that they were rapidly losing them to private employers.

Much the same phenomenon has occurred in Western Europe, though not yet to the same extent as in the United States. The accomplishments of the Scandinavian countries in the field of adult education have been noteworthy. The French government has lately given increased attention to special training and retraining programs for adults. Adult education in the Federal Republic of Germany and the United Kingdom, largely through private auspices, has taken on new life since 1945. Industrial firms throughout Europe are stepping up their in-service training and career development programs (though apparently too slowly to keep pace with their needs). The military services are training computer programmers, electronics technicians, and the like, who end up in civilian jobs.

The U.S.S.R. and other socialist countries of Europe have all along attached high importance to ‘continuing education’ and have made impressive strides in pursuit of it. They appear to have gone farther than most Western nations in breaking down the artificial barriers that have perpetuated for too long an unwholesome separation between formal and nonformal education. As a result, there is a continuing dialogue in the socialist countries between the universities and technical schools, the industries they serve, and the pioneers of industrial research. Two questions are central to the dialogue: (1) the adequacy of the existing educational programs, and how they might be improved, and (2) what new types of manpower will be needed for new types of technologies still on the horizon, and hence what innovations are needed now in educational programs in order to meet these new needs. Beyond this, the educational systems in these countries have forged an unusually close relationship between work and study. Thus about half the students enrolled in university engineering programs in the Soviet Union are part-time students with regular jobs. They do much of their learning by correspondence, and more recently by television as well, along with periodic study periods at the university. There are numerous opportunities for an able and ambitious worker in the Soviet Union to advance himself by ‘going back to school,’ without heavy personal sacrifice. University professors, in turn, are obliged, and given time off, to keep pace with relevant new developments in their own fields, such as computer programming, in order to keep their research capabilities from growing obsolete. Other professionals, such as doctors, are obliged and enabled to keep pace with new knowledge and techniques in their respective fields.

This proliferation of shadow systems of education will surely continue apace in the industrialized countries. The need is evident, the motivation is strong, and the resources can be found. Besides keeping people up to date, these more flexible programs are compensating for the deficiencies of the formal educational system which stem from its failure to adapt rapidly enough to changing needs.

All this underscores the importance of evolving a more coherent view of the ‘nonformal educational system’ to facilitate a more effective co-ordination of its many parts with each other and with formal education.

The same conditions that created the need for ‘continuing education’ in these countries have also made necessary a fundamental redefinition of the role of formal education. In this new context of rapid change, the prime role of formal education – as we have several times stressed – must be to ‘teach people to learn for themselves’ so that they can later absorb new knowledge and skills efficiently on their own. Even the greatest universities cannot hope to turn out ‘educated’ people – in the sense that the have ‘completed’ their education. Their aim and hope must be to turn out educable people, well prepared for a life of learning – which is a quite different matter.

Alone the last paragraph of this chapter is worth the effort to re-type this all. Don’t you ask yourself like I do: Why is this statement still so true – and yet seemingly unheard – almost 40 years after it was written?!

Former Special Rapporteur on the Right to Education (and Professor of International Law and International Relations at Lund University) Katarina Tomasevski discusses whether the right to education has a future within the United Nations in an article for the Oxford Journal “Human Rights Law Review”.

The Human Rights Law Review describes itself as seeking ‘to promote awareness, knowledge and discussion on matters of human rights law and policy’ by publishing critical articles. Tomasevski is critical alright and hopefully will continue to promote much needed discussion on the right to education.

Her article is entitled

“Has the Right to Education a Future Within the United Nations? A Behind-the-Scenes Account by the Special Rapporteur on the Right to Education 1998-2004″.

It is available for free from the website of the Human Rights Law Review, both as an online article and a printable pdf-version.

The right to education, Tomasevski argues, has been betrayed by the United Nations Commission on Human Rights and has become a traded service.

Meanwhile this very Commission has recently been replaced by the new UN Human Rights Council after having been criticised heavily for missing legitimacy and the creation of underfunded mandates bound to fail. The jury is still out whether the UN will mess up this renewed attempt at protecting human rights and addressing violations or not.

One of the most interesting notions in Tomasevski’s article is her argument that economic, social and cultural rights are not about poverty but policy and, using China and the US as examples to illustrate her point, asks:

“First, if economic, social and cultural rights have not even been addressed, let alone realised, in a country as wealthy as the US, what chance do poor countries have? And, second, since it is so much easier to realise economic, social and cultural rights in wealthy countries, should one not look at them and discern which models might work universally?”

Instead of blaming poverty in connection with reasons usually claimed to be beyond control, she blames wealth and the policies resulting from it for the lack of education.

In another article for the electronic journal “Law, Social Justice and Global Development” Tomasevksi describes in more detail the diabolic role of the World Bank and the impact of its model of financing primary education which has only been changed recently as a result of her dialogue with the bank. (Has anyone ever wondered why the European Youth Forum never managed to voice such fundamental criticism loudly in their feable attempts to co-operate with the World Bank?)

Despite the recent World Bank policy changes, the effects of such policies (by not only the World Bank but also the IMF and, in general, wealthy governments) on education – namely: economic exclusion and manifestation of violations of the right to education – are also highlighted in her new report The State of the Right to Education Worldwide: “Free or Fee: 2006 Global Report“.

All of which is, truly, highly recommended reading.

The Special Rapporteur on Education

Website of the Special Rapporteur on the Right to Education

Annual Report 2006
Annual Report 2005
Annual Report 2004
Annual Report 2003
Annual Report 2002
Annual Report 2001
Annual Report 2000
Annual Report 1999

The State of the Right to Education Worldwide

Free or Fee: 2006 Global Report – Website
Free or Fee: 2006 Global Report – Pdf-Version

Publications (Primers) from the Project “Right to Education” (all pdf-files):

Removing Obstacles in the Way of the Right to Education
Free and Compulsary Education for All Children
Making Education Available, Accessible, Acceptable and Adaptable
Human Rights in Education as a Prerequisite for Human Rights Education

The situation of education in the world

Youth and Education – UN Global Youth Policy
World Education Report 2000
OECD Education at a Glance

Global Institutional Education Initiatives

UN Millenium Development Goals – Universal Primary Education
United Nations Literacy Decade 2003-2012
UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development 2005-2014

Education For All – UNESCO Website
Education for all by 2015 – Action weeks
Education For all – Global Monitoring Report

Note:

Obviously, you will also find all the documents at the different websites, where they are freely available for download. It is against our ethical standards as bloggers to steal bandwidth from other people without them knowing it, which is why we offer you the downloads also directly from our site in addition to the original locations.

Independent of that, ownership of and credit for the articles, books and publications belong solely to the authors and publishers — who have made it freely available in an attempt to share knowledge with civil society and the public.