Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-02-25-Speech-3-134"
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"en.20040225.10.3-134"2
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".
Mr President, Mr Graça Moura, ladies and gentlemen, I should like to thank the Committee on Culture, Youth, Education, the Media and Sport, and above all its rapporteur, Mr Vasco Graça Moura, for a clear-sighted report which stresses the interface between schools and culture. I should like to broaden the scope of the discussion so as to include, as well as schools in the strict sense of the word, the school of life which is the family. That is where it all starts, and later it continues at school. I am very happy to see, Mr President, that as always Parliament not only supports what the Commission is doing but also adds
to the new ideas being developed by the Commission, thereby helping it to forge ahead.
You are right in saying that we cannot build Europe solely on the basis of the economy and finance. Europe is constructed on the basis of men and women, and therefore of cultures. I agree with you in recognising that education systems ought to guarantee that, by the time they complete their secondary education, students possess the knowledge and skills which are necessary for them to prepare to assume their roles as citizens in Europe. I say ‘ought to’ because the reality is somewhat different, as we are all well aware. Even though students sometimes learn about their own regional or national roots, they are still a very long way off from learning about the roots of others, the roots of their neighbours. During a previous debate on the subject of youth, I gave you a figure. It referred to the Comenius programme, which links together schools in the European Union, so as to enable young people to participate in joint projects, thereby learning about the cultures of neighbouring countries. Well, despite the fact that two million students took part in this programme, that represents only one per cent of the population of our schools. We are therefore still a long way from achieving our aims. We are doing the right thing, but we are not doing enough, and we need to be aware of this.
Our education programmes are therefore trying to respond to the desire of both the rapporteur and the Committee on Culture, and to the need which lies behind that desire, i.e. that our young people should learn about the real world in which they live. In this context, our cultural programmes prove to be valuable instruments for making Europeans aware of cultural diversity. Once again, however, this is not enough to reach all our citizens, or even the great majority of them. In the world of cinema, there is the MEDIA programme, which also helps to make people aware of cultural diversity through the medium of film, and which is obtaining good results. I would also ask you to remember the first major pan-European cultural event, Cinedays, the aim of which was above all to teach young people about cultural diversity through the cinema. There again, it was a good thing but it was not enough.
I should therefore like to say to you that I shall need all your support in order to reinforce this aspect in the financial perspective and in the new programmes which I intend to submit to you shortly. We are already doing this, though our efforts are a mere drop in the ocean. In saying that, I am thinking about the Culture 2000 Programme and the RESEO project, which brings together the educational services of the major European opera companies with one aim in mind, to enable children and young people to discover opera through its cultural roots. I am also thinking about the CLIOH's Workshop, which is setting up cooperation between many European universities with a view to producing teaching material on European history. Yes, these things exist, but there must be a willingness at national level to make them an obligatory component of history syllabuses and of cultural education.
I should also like to take this opportunity to announce that an initiative has been launched with a view to carrying out a major study to produce an inventory of best practices in bringing together culture and education in Member States, candidate countries and third countries in the European Economic Area. The next Parliament will have the results of that study at the beginning of 2005. We are not, therefore, content just to sit and complain. We are making progress, even though we know that that progress is very limited.
Mr Graça Moura, you will understand, in these circumstances, that your report comes just at the right moment and is grist to our mill inasmuch as it gives us ideas, it supports our actions, and it points us in the right direction, which will be very useful at a time when, as you know, education and culture are increasingly regarded as major elements in the construction of European citizenship. Finally, Mr President, I should like to say a big thank you to Parliament and to its rapporteur, for this important contribution towards the future of our young citizens."@en1
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