LATIN AMERICA: Declaration Demands Higher Education for All

By Dalia Acosta Reprint | | Print |

Dalia Acosta

HAVANA, Nov 22 1996 (IPS) - Representatives of 24 Latin American and Caribbean nations made a declaration calling for the lifelong right to higher education for all, on a basis of discrimination- free individual merit here Friday.

“Higer education, along with being a human right everyone should have access to, is an irreplaceable element for social development,” read the document.

Knowledge is described as “a social asset which can only be generated, transmitted and recreated to the benefit of the nation in plural and free institutions, which enjoy full independence and academic freedom.

The Havana declaration and a guide for the development of a regional action plan are the two most important outcomes of the Regional Conference on Policies and Strategies for the Transformation of Higher Education which opened here last Monday.

This is the first in a cycle of regional meetings in the run up to a world conference in 1998, called by the United Nations Education, Science and Culture Organisation (UNESCO).

For four days, more than 500 academics, university rectors, governmental authorities and representatives from non governmental organisations discussed the main problems of higher education in the area, recognising the need for urgent, radical change in the education systems.

The Havana declaration recognises the emergence of a new productive paradigm, where economic and social development “depend on the development of highly trained personnel and the potential for the creation of knowledge, suited to the specific needs and deficiencies of each region.”

“The breach which presently separates the regional nations from those of the developing world is fundamentally demonstrated in the area of education, research and technological and data- handling development.”

The document adds that “higher education must strengthen its capacity for advance critical analysis and vision of the future.”

This capacity, it added, would allow it to “develop proposals alternative development proposals and confront, on a long-term basis, the problems arising from a situation of continuous and rapid transformation.”

In order to do this, the higher education institutions must adopt organisational structures and educational strategies which would arm them with “a high degree of agility, flexibility, rapid responses and anticipation,” said the text.

On another front, the universities and other insititutions which make up the system, like the professional colleges, polytechnics and teacher training institutes, must become centres for the up-dating and retraining of professionals.

“The concept of permanent education concurs with the nature of contemporary knowledge,” said the declaration, adding that “beyond the idea of accumulating paper qualifications, acquired competence has a value all of its own.”

The new demands for higher education also include “training graduates who learn to learn and initiate” so they will be able to “generate their own jobs” and to live in the “systemmatic and permanent search of knowledge.”

This process will imply “the revision of current pedagogical methods, moving the emphasis from the transmission of knowledge to the process of generating it.”

The declaration recognises the role of research as an indispensible part of the educational system and stresses the most pressing regional need is for the introduction of a solid computer culture.

“Cooperation between universities could be facilitated by the constant progress in information technology and communication which would be strengthened by the current processes of economic and political integration,” it said.

The Habana meeting also presented the need to redirect international cooperation on the issue of higher education, so as to substitute the donor-recipient model by an exchange between the parts, on the basis of the creation of regional and subregional university networks.

The participants stated that “public support for higher education continues to be indispensible” and that the drive for transformations in the system must be built on the establishment of a “new social consensus” on the functions of the universities.