FOR most youngsters in compulsory education, the idea of ‘lifelong learning’ might seem little short of a nightmare.
Yet it is precisely this attitude that the Commission’s European Year of Lifelong Learning is seeking to counter, despite a severely limited budget of just 8.5 million ecu.
Launched in Venice on 2 February this year, the first ‘European Year’ since 1993 has proved something of an education for the small but committed band of officials in the Directorate-General for education (DGXXII) charged with coordinating the programme on behalf of Education Commissioner Edith Cresson.
Initially regarded as a response to the challenges facing Europe’s workforce in the much-heralded ‘information society’, the initiative has also highlighted the crucial social and cultural benefits to be gained from encouraging people back into education and training.
“The year has seen a real bottom-up approach. People are really getting organised and not just relying on public authorities to find solutions to their educational needs. As much as anything else, it has been a self-fulfilment thing, reversing people’s negative school experiences,” said one Commission official.
“Many people still feel that alienation – what I call the Pink Floyd effect,” he added, referring to the British rock band’s famous song about disaffected youth and attitudes to institutionalised education.
Launching the programme, Cresson had an altogether more serious message, pointing to growing jobless figures around the EU and the need for workers to maintain a high level of expertise and training to remain employable.
She said the European Year would “help to raise awareness of the need for all Europeans to develop new skills and knowledge on an on-going basis to cope with the profound changes which are taking place in society”.
The Commissioner stressed that modern technology could produce new jobs if handled correctly, but could also undermine existing structures and increase the risks of inequality and social exclusion if people were not prepared properly for the changes brought by the relentless pace of scientific progress.
The Year of Lifelong Learning was the first Europe-wide response to an idea which has been talked about by educationalists for over 25 years, and sought to build on a major European resource.
According to French historian Jacques Le Goff, “Europe’s main raw material is unquestionably its grey matter.”Surveys carried out early in the year showed that while 70% of EU citizens were interested in further training, the same proportion had not received any in the preceding 12 months. “We also found that people were scared about their future prospects,” said an official.
The year set a number of specific and apparently ambitious goals. These included guaranteeing high quality education for all without discrimination, the promotion of vocational training, improved cooperation between the educational and business sectors, and raising awareness among unions and employers of the importance of training for job-seekers.
A number of marginalised groups to be targeted included young people, women’s and senior citizens’ organisations, and those pressing for equal opportunities for all disadvantaged groups, not least the long-term unemployed.
The results of the Commission’s initiative will be assessed by EU education ministers when they assemble in Brussels on 21 November.
They will also form the focus of the year’s closing event in Dublin on 6 December, where a study group made up of 25 international experts will present a separate report on the future of education.
Within the walls of DGXXII, there is a genuine buzz at the success of a programme which has generated 4,000 individual projects and 2,000 events, including conferences, seminars, fairs, competitions and television programmes. While some of these might have happened anyway, 550 events benefited directly from EU financing, with the largest individual grant accounting for 150,000 ecu and the smallest just 569 ecu.
But even where a lack of money has prevented direct Commission involvement in educational programmes, officials believe its role has been crucial.
“The Commission has been a facilitator, allowing people to share and exchange ideas. European Years are supposed to be consciousness-raising operations, hitting the citizens in the street,” said one.
If the thick volumes of press cuttings from around the member states are anything to go by, the programme has certainly struck a chord with EU citizens.
Unlike the European Year for the Elderly in 1993, activities this time have been aimed at the whole population. But the organisers believe they have also marked a natural progression from the 1993 programme, encouraging those at the end of their working lives to continue to play an active part in society.
“There is a self-fulfilment element, stopping people from just lying down to die when they get to the end of their careers. Life has become compartmentalised andwe need to find new roles and interests for people,” said one.
If this all sounds fine in theory, but a little woolly in practice, the Commission is quick to underline that it is planning to feed the more tangible results of its experiences this year into the general debate on the future of education, an area in which the EU has only had a genuine role since the Maastricht Treaty came into force.
Some member states have already decided on national follow-up measures, including a multi-million-ecu programme in Sweden.
The Commission believes such initiatives are important in order to allay fears that the momentum built up during the year could peter out in the absence of a clear longer-term target.
The year was initially greeted with a certain degree of suspicion by some governments. Germany, for example, took little or no action until a definitive decision had been taken on the legal base for the year.
“But they soon accepted it once we made clear that we were not trying to take over their national education systems,” said one Commission official.
With such limited funding, decisions had to be made early on which projects were deserving of EU money. These were selected at two separate sessions in November 1995 and February 1996.
The day-to-day running of the programme and information-sharing has been the responsibility of a steering committee of officials from education and social affairs ministries across the Union which held its final coordination meeting two weeks ago.
The fact that an increasing number of countries have joint education and employment ministries reflects a growing belief across the Union that the premise behind the year was correct – that the need for training extends well beyond formal compulsory schooling.
Bringing civil servants from the member states together on a regular basis has also had clear benefits. With EU competence in the educational field severely limited, there have been few previous opportunities to share experience.
Increasingly, officials have been able to draw on successful initiatives in neighbouring member states and adapt them to their own national situations.
An essay writing competition set up in Marseilles to attract immigrants into further education was an idea taken up by both the Spanish and the Belgians. It was just one of hundreds of original ideas dreamt up by some highly-imaginative thinkers around the Union.
One project in northern England saw teachers from further education colleges going into local pubs to give sample lessons to the customers at the bar with 2,000 ecu of Commission support and sponsorship from a local brewery.
“People could see how rewarding it was without having to make that difficult psychological step of going to a college and signing up,” explained an official.
A well-known mid-afternoon programme on Irish television carried regular features on the year, including an item about a hotel owner who had been so ashamed of her inability to pass on nuggets of local history to German tourists that she had gone to night school to learn about it.
In Finland, over 250 ‘passengers’ boarded a lifelong-learning train for a journey from Helsinki to the Arctic Circle as part of a four-day conference.
In Portugal, the enterprising Teresa Ricou set up the Chapitô initiative in an old quarter of Lisbon to offer government-regulated courses in circus skills.
Denmark has been singled out for particular praise for its so-called ‘learning boutiques’, set up in medium-sized cities to evaluate individuals’ skills before suggesting suitable training opportunities.
Aside from the obvious training advantages, the organisers quickly found the projects had an unexpected fringe benefit. “Switched-off people can rediscover the social side of their community,” said one official.
The Commission now has the unenviable task of sifting through the results of all these experiments to see what lessons can be learned for the future.
Officials are already looking ahead, suggesting, for example, that training could play a greater role in future collective bargaining agreements as the working week shortens and advances in technology continue to accelerate.