EDUCATION:
Making Another World Possible
Mario Osava
The World Education Forum (WEF), which
ended Saturday in this southern Brazilian city, put into practice one of the
guidelines included in its final document: giving young people a greater
role in the production of knowledge.
PORTO ALEGRE, Brazil, Jul 31 (IPS) - The journalistic coverage of this year's WEF was carried out by 96
students from 27 public schools in the city of Porto Alegre. ''We are
producing reports for community radio stations, newspapers, videos and the
Internet,'' 14-year-old Maximiliano Franco, an eighth-grader, told IPS.
Franco has been doing interviews for radio. ''I learned a lot. I had
never done this before,'' he said.
Another eighth-grader, Pamela Cristina dos Santos, 13, has been writing
reports for an on-line and print daily newspaper. ''We learned more than we
do in class, attending the conferences, talking to people, meeting other
people,'' she said.
Providing incentives for giving children and adolescents a greater role
in generating knowledge was just one of 16 guidelines laid out in the World
Education Platform, aimed at promoting ''emancipatory'' quality universal
education at all levels, free of charge, on the understanding that
guaranteeing funding is the state's obligation.
Other basic principles contained in the final document approved by the
third annual edition of WEF were defending public education as a human right
and rejecting the commercialisation of education.
The educators who met for four days in Porto Alegre also underscored
their rejection of national and international agreements that treat
education as a commodity, as well as ''structural adjustment programmes that
pressure governments'' to cut social spending.
In addition, the document calls for a global mobilisation to fight for
gender equality and an end to discrimination of all kinds in schools, the
democratisation of the administration of educational institutions, and
greater recognition of education workers.
WEF, which has been held every year since 2001 in Porto Alegre, the
capital of the state of Río Grande do Sul, drew more than 22,000
participants from 48 countries to this year's edition.
'Education for Another World' was the general theme at the forum, debated
in three conferences, five ''thematic debates'' and 79 ''self-managed
activities'', including seminars, workshops and panels.
The World Education Platform is a ''provisional'' document, because it is
still in construction, said Bernard Charlot from France, one of the 29
members of the WEF international council.
The forum is facing three major challenges in the immediate future,
Charlot said in the closing ceremony: forging a closer link with the World
Social Forum (WSF); becoming a truly global movement; and ''going beyond
mere discourse'' to move on from the affirmation of principles to following
a platform of struggle.
WEF was born in October 2001 in Porto Alegre, which is also the
birthplace of the WSF, held in opposition to the World Economic Forum in
Davos, Switzerland. The theme of the WSF annual gathering of civil society
is 'Another World Is Possible'.
So far WEF has been ''very American and Brazilian'' and it should be held
in Africa and Asia as well to become a truly global phenomenon, said
Charlot. But neither the venue nor date of the next edition have been set
yet by the international council.
Furthermore, Porto Alegre ''wants the forum to stay here,'' said
Francisco Rodríguez, a local teacher who coordinated the organisation of
this year's forum.
In the last conference of the forum, on 'Solidarity, Democracy and
Peace', Bernard Cassen of France, the director of the newspaper Le Monde
Diplomatique and a member of the WSF international council, underlined the
need to salvage the meaning of these terms and others whose significance has
been distorted or negated by neo-liberal thinking, which he called ''a
virus'' that ''has infected people's minds.''
''Knowledge workers'' like educators and intellectuals, should ''tear
down the ideological defences of neo-liberalism'' as their contribution to
making ''another world possible'', said Cassen.
''Solidarity does not exist in the neo-liberal vocabulary,'' which only
recognises individuals, and ''destroys the idea of society,'' exalting
individual fortunes and reducing life to consumption and consumerism, said
Cassen.
Democracy has been sacrificed on the altar of the economy and finances,
and peace is sought through war in neo-liberal thinking. It is thus always
in need of an enemy, which today is terrorism, the successor to communism
and the Soviet bloc, he argued.
In another WEF event, Hugo Rodríguez from Uruguay drew attention to ''the
risk'' posed by words. Some dictatorships in Latin America took power under
the pretext of restoring democracy, and the insistence on referring to
education as ''an investment'' rather than an expense led to the current
obsession with ''measuring the profitability'' and cost-effectiveness of
education, he said.
In the past, schools educated for solidarity, and now they educate to
make people ''competitive'', having undergone a complete change of values,
he complained.
Schools must also teach human rights and civil disobedience, like how to
organise demonstrations, said Marcelo Rezende, a professor of pedagogy from
a university in Porto Alegre.
In his view, there are already signs of ''another world'' in the massive
marches and peace movements, the forums that are becoming more and more
numerous, and the campaigns for disarmament.
(END/2004)
