Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-09-25-Speech-1-158"
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"en.20060925.18.1-158"2
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Mr President, the purpose of this report is very clear and specific. It calls upon the Council of Ministers to give a fresh impetus to the inclusion and enhancement of the European dimension in school curricula. That is a national competence and the national, regional, and educational authorities in our Member States vary. However, this Parliament is totally within its rights – and indeed has a duty – to remind the Council of Ministers that it passed a resolution back in May 1988 calling for the enhancement of the European dimension in education. It is the virtually unanimous feeling of the committee that it is high time that this was updated. So what are the practical steps?
First of all, the European dimension should not simply be a vague platitude, a notion that governments pay lip-service to but in actual fact do very little to achieve. I hope attention has been drawn to this in committee and I hope that the Finnish Presidency will be able to confirm by correspondence that this item will be included on the agenda of the next Council of Education Ministers meeting in Brussels on 13 November. I look forward to receiving confirmation of that. We think that there should be a discussion by our ministers, specifically about what the European dimension entails.
As far as Parliament’s committee is concerned, we have looked at two aspects. Firstly, in citizenship classes, what used to be called ‘civics’: an understanding of what the EU is, how its institutions operate and, in particular, the democratic input of individuals, interests and concerns in the decision-making; and second, and equally important, an understanding of our common cultural and historical heritage. Parliament held a hearing on the teaching of history and its European dimension two years ago. Of course, national stories are the foundation stone of an understanding of our past, but it is impossible to teach the classical empires of Greece and Rome, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Napoleonic wars, the Industrial Revolution, the struggles between democracies and dictatorship without reference to the European context.
We also dwell specifically on the importance of language teaching. That has declined very significantly in my own country in recent years. In the last two years, the number of 16-year-old students studying languages has dropped by as much as 14%, as our government has made it an option rather than a compulsory element of the curriculum.
Looking across Europe, our understanding and our use of languages is very imbalanced. As English increasingly becomes a ‘lingua franca’, for those of us with English as our mother tongue that is a real problem in terms of motivating students to study and teachers to teach foreign languages. And yet without that cultural understanding that goes with an understanding of language, how on earth are we going to be able to cooperate properly and enrich the content of our educational syllabuses?
With regard to teacher awareness, I mentioned that there is a disparity, not only across the EU but within Member States. Some schools pay considerable attention to the European dimension, fully engaging in European exchange programmes, for example, using not simply resources from the EU but national and independent resources, television and newspaper archive material, while others concentrate hardly at all on the European dimension. Therefore we have a ‘scatter’ effect.
It is important that teacher training courses should offer potential teachers the opportunity to be aware of what teaching materials are available and how they can fit into curricula.
I draw your attention to paragraph 13 of the report, which we are grateful to Mrs Novak for incorporating. It states that: ‘The European dimension complements national content. It neither replaces nor supplants it.’ There is a very small fringe of people who would attack this report and say that it is all about propaganda, trying to force people to see only the rosy and beneficial side of the European Union. I would return that taunt by saying that it is they who would seek to deny information, who are actually distorting the picture, depriving our students of the opportunity to make a balanced judgment of their own and to consider what their career opportunities might be, because they have had the full information given to them consistently, throughout their time at school.
This report is a call to the Council of Ministers for action. We look forward to seeing the positive results."@en1
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