Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-09-08-Speech-5-025"
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"en.20000908.4.5-025"2
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"Mr President, first of all, I should like to congratulate our rapporteur on her excellent work and also on the commendable way in which she cooperated in the Committee on Culture, Youth, Education, the Media and Sport. Philosophical and literary texts, as well as popular wisdom, tell us that ‘you are never too old to learn’. The ‘Lifelong Learning’ initiative was a perfectly proper one and the result of a wise decision, aimed at doing justice to the demands of the twenty-first century and at enabling people to adjust to these demands.
It is mainly the early phases of life which, right into our own time, have been, and remain, the time for education and training. The importance of lifelong learning cannot, however, be limited to the spheres of education and training policy alone. Its success also depends, in large measure, upon labour-market policy and upon the successful dissemination of science and technology. Lifelong learning begins where schooling, or basic education, leaves off, and this is where the first and, in my view, also the greatest weakness of this wonderful initiative is to be found. Lifelong learning can only work if there is a change to the way in which, and above all the pace at which, basic education under the original educational systems is adapted.
In a knowledge society, one of the main functions of schooling should be to offer students methods they need to gain access to large amounts of information, to understand this information and to transform it into knowledge. Syllabuses, or the means by which learning has so far been imparted, must be fundamentally altered. I do not of course want to interfere in the nation states, but this is, nonetheless, an idea which we ought to explore communally in this European Community.
Instead, the direction taken should be an individual one, but with social components. We need to learn more about arguing critically, about increasing students’ self-confidence and about increasing their ability to express themselves in language. Skills of this kind will become ever more important alongside instrumental skills such as the ability to write, to acquire other languages and to do arithmetic.
One goal must be to enable pupils constantly to update their knowledge and skills so that they are neither able nor willing to view a diploma or certificate as the end of a learning process or as a seal of approval upon something finally completed. Our society must break away from the outdated system of school, work and pension. Lifelong learning begins, then, with the reform of our schooling. The individual must learn for him or herself. That is not something it lies within our power to bring about, but we can do a lot to help bring it about, for the population of Europe is not, of course, just a human resource for the European labour market, but a wealth of marvellous individuals.
Allow me to give a personal example by way of conclusion. I know a joiner in a small suburb of Vienna where the prejudice is still somewhat commonly held that anyone who works with their hands must not be very well educated. This joiner is between 40 and 50 years of age, speaks four languages and is known as something of a philosopher. A Europe of people like that would be my ideal."@en1
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