Dear guests,
First of all I would like to thank the Council of Europe, the International Consortium, the University of Oslo, the International Association of Universities and the European Wergeland centre for inviting me here, and for having this conference which, although it probably won’t end up on CNN, comes at a crucial turning point in the development of our societies and will hopefully be relevant for citizens on both sides of the AtlanticToday I am representing more than 11 million students, represented in ESU through 45 national unions of students from 38 different countries. The difficult task is upon me to reflect what these 11 million students in Europe are thinking about their society, and about their education. And that’s seriously changing.
10 years ago the ESU Chairperson would probably have been much more optimistic about our then prosperous society, and the focus would be on investing in student mobility, opening up our systems for our neighboring students and living in a connected academic society. Today European students are worried. Worried about their future, concerned about that society and what the previous generations have done with it.
We have to face a future where prosperity is distributed by rating agencies, where our travel will be restricted by new border controls and where education becomes a mere trade-off between the need to have a degree on the job market and the ever-so-much increasing cost of it.
This future needs to change.
We are not content to go down in history as the first generation of modern Europe that can expect to “benefit” from fewer opportunities than the previous one - whether it be from a grave age gap in wages, high risks of dropout, post-graduation unemployment or limited support in starting a new home and a new family. We are also not content to being passive in the face of this new and sad reality.
But we live in a society where being passive is becoming a habit.
Europe is suffering from a growing indifference, with citizens being tired of reforms and of the economic setbacks that the baby-boomer generation has irresponsibly let down on us.
This indifference or no-questions-asked attitude is in my view breeding ground for populism and for the shift to the intolerant right we are currently experiencing. While 10 years ago we would have had no problems in demanding an open and accessible Europe, we now have little hope that Europe will become more tolerant in the next years, let alone that European integration will continue.
We are indeed living, what Bruno Kaufmann calls, an ethno-nationalistic backslash in many countries: from Finland to Bulgaria, from Austria to Denmark right-wing nationalistic populism is gaining ground, at the cost of tolerance and many times at the cost of the social dimension in our societies.
What I want to outline today is how we as students, in cooperation with you as academic leaders of today, would like to change that future, and most importantly how higher education is the key to any of these changes.
Higher education at the macro-level should serve as the guardian of our democracy and of the values that once made Europe such a peaceful and pleasant place to live and study in. And we’ll also have a look at the micro-level and how higher education there can beat this looming passiveness that is holding us from further evolving in our democratic societies.
Although I might have sounded very pessimistic, I together with all European students, still foster hope and will show you what we
- through higher education –
need to do to change this situation for the better; how we can help our democracies to take it to the next level.
As said, I would like to start off with the role higher education has to play at the macro-level in our societies.
We as students truly believe higher education should be at the centre of our communities, as it creates educated citizens that are serving as a reference in our societies, the ones that other citizens build on and trust on for the creation and guidance of our societies in a democratic way.
As Minister Tora Aasland put it yesterday: universities have been the nesting places for independent thinking. Just as the Council of Europe was called a centre of reflection yesterday, higher education should remind us, citizens of what’s important. Away from markets, away from politics, and it’s therefore sad to see that in many places rectors, vice-chancellors are giving away power to the presidents of the board of trustees, to the economic leaders of the region, that are often more short-sighted and focused on short-term needs of the labour market than rectors with their academic and cultural baggage could be.
If our academic governance gets dominated by the short-term economic market needs, who will ensure the independence of the academics working there, who will ensure the independence in thinking as an institution and as a lighthouse for the society around it?
Obviously higher education can be of great importance to steer democracy, to ‘learn’ pluralism, to transmit the right set of values to the leaders of tomorrow. I admit it also depends on the personal interest of the leader in question if the values and tools learnt in higher education are used for the right purpose, but nobody will question the benefits of a broad education resulting in a pluralistic attitude.
Furthermore on the macro-level higher education is crucial to maintain a collective history, and to transfer it between generations. It makes us learn from mistakes in the past, it teaches us about human rights, it makes us understand the acts of different cultures and should help us to live together in peace. Higher Education should hence be accessible for all, without any discrimination, so learners from all levels of our society can be shaped as active citizens.
Additionally, higher education should maintain its independence from any short-sighted market powers, not only for the sake of quality education but also for the sake of our democracies.
It is therefore critical that some of the European governments take a step back from where they are going now, and invest in the academic freedom, in the financial and academic independence of their institutions. By treating education as a commodity and by looking at the students or business to finance the whole cost of education they are undermining the entire idea of the university as a nesting place for independent thinking.
They are besides pushing their students away from their societies and taking away the last fresh blood they had for their future democracies.
Because of a steep rise in tuition fees, our members from the United Kingdom are vigorously seeking other European destinations where education can be provided at a cheaper rate, with no guarantee that they will return to work and contribute to the British society.
Another part of the United Kingdom’s society is undoubtedly pulling out of higher education, and the youngest are giving up on their dream of having access to a university because they will never be able to afford it or earn the investment back.
The United Kingdom is the first to go that extreme, but as our democracies are relying on the educated citizens,
as innovation should come from strong higher education and progress in the development from our strongest educated citizens, the introduction of high tuition fees in other Western European countries could create a new stream of ‘free-movers’ that leave their country behind in education deficit.
If these governments don’t urgently start treating their education again as a public good and a public responsibility, we as students fear a diminution of intellectual advancement, and in the long run of innovation and prosperity and of democracy.
We already face it today.
As already mentioned yesterday, The Economists Democracy Index went down in 91 out of 167 countries mentioned there.
No fear over here as Norway is now officially the most democratic country in the world, but many European countries have become flawed democracies, subject to market influence, subject to corruption. And as we’ve heard from the previous speaker the best way to beat this can be through the citizens saying no to these evolutions, gathering in groups or NGO’s and fighting the injustice and abuse of their rights to democracy.
Although I would very much like it to be the case, unfortunately the revolutionary wishes that made Serbia – still according to the Economist – a flawed democracy instead of an authoritarian-regime-ruled-country, are even in Serbia, but all over Europe, lacking today.
I come from a country where for now 380 days there is no government. You would imagine protests, riots, a furious civil society reclaiming their votes, demanding a solution. But no, in Belgium, ironically enough symptomatic for a larger share of Europe, the citizens don’t necessarily care. If they would care even a bit, and would be taught to actively pursue their societal welfare, things would not look the same.
That’s why the European Students’ Union believes that next to the macro-level with the higher education institutions as guides for our democratic development a lot can be done on the micro-level, within the institutions.
If you’re only taught to listen to what the teacher has to bring, and copy that for your examination, it’s only normal that the citizens this education brings forward, are not as critical as they could be and are rather passive towards all societal development.
As Sjur Bergan pointed out yesterday, democracy is not only about having institutions in place, and having fair procedures and elections, but it’s about the daily participation of citizens in a society, and apathy, disinterest is the biggest threat to our democratic development.
The education Europe knows in many places today fosters this apathy for the majority of the classroom. Apart from the witty student that actively seeks more knowledge than provided in the classroom, our institutions have become battery cages, where students are fed information with little opportunity for interaction and independent thinking.
The product of this kind of education is, surely with notable exceptions, a citizen open for populist propaganda, without questions asked, and indifferent to what is being done to the democratic society they live in.
While people that don’t have it, know what they are fighting for, European citizens today don’t realize enough what they can loose again if they are not fighting for it or at least standing up for it. And our higher education can change this.
By implementing student-centred learning, that was also mentioned as an ambition in the European Higher Education Area, in the Ministerial Communiqué of the 2009 Leuven/Louvain-La-Neuve conference, higher education institutions could stimulate the students to become active citizens again, ask questions, seek improvement and become active contributors to the welfare of their societies.
The demand for student-centred learning is very legitimate, and even in times of mass higher education, the European Students’ Union believes student-centred learning is paramount for students to fully develop their potential, for universities to skill the future workforce, and to create the best leaders for tomorrow.
It’s about a mindset and a culture within our institutions that students are active participants in their own learning, guided to excel beyond their own expectations but allowed to do that on their own in cooperation with their colleagues.
The model ESU is proposing in its toolkit for student-centred learning is based on constructivist theories of learning. The teacher knows the expectations of the students, and the students are more autonomous in creating their own curriculum and progress.
Even with a very bad student/staff ratio it is possible to organise this, and actually the exercise should produce a more efficient work environment with less time-taking lectures, less examinations and more self-and-peer assessment.
The new way of learning should be independent and problem-based, going out in the field to collect data, digest this and transform it into academic knowledge. As I read in an article in the Huffington Post a while ago, students should answer the questions themselves today. They don’t need someone to preach a truth; they need guidance on what tools to use and how to use these in search of the answers to their questions.
There are more and more online courses, but why not more in a form like the one the brilliant Khan Academy already promotes: where students become teachers for less strong students, and where their peer work with thorough mentoring can become as valuable as a classic academic course. This Khan Academy entirely takes place online, and can make students from Brazil that are good at mathematics help students from Azerbaijan to get the picture.
A lot of support is still needed at the entry-level, but there are examples of universities that have even abolished examination, and leave the students themselves to work on projects and assess each other’s performance.
All of it is obviously mentored by a teacher, but as such the student learns to be independent and entrepreneurial. The student also learns how to debate with colleagues, how to develop ideas and gains those valuable transferable skills that are needed to function in any labour market and society.
It makes us students think outside of the box and perform in the interdisciplinary environment around us. And more importantly, it makes us question the information which is given to us, and makes us go out into society to change what’s going wrong and protect the values we adhere to.
I can understand that you are probably thinking: here comes the student representative again with an idealistic idea that we won’t be able to pay for and that will never work in our institution.
But this is not the case.
Firstly, I am talking about a paradigm shift, a total change of mentality, a shift of education and curriculum design, in which both the teacher and the student have to arrive in the classroom with a different attitude. The teacher has to know and want to know what students are expecting, and what their background is when they start, the student has to be willing to pursue knowledge and actively engage in his or her educational career.
It’s not through articles and essays that this change will happen, but hands on.
Rectors and academic directors can start tomorrow, by taking the checklist from our toolkit to see how their institutions rate on the scale of student-centred learning. Measures are proposed to improve that rating, and to create a student-centred learning environment even in the largest class rooms.
But more is needed of course. I still hold that league tables and university rankings are a malicious and simplistic way of measuring quality, but it would already be a slight improvement if they would also value the teaching mission, teaching innovation and student satisfaction in the institution, rather than being mainly based on research output. As Altbach says, the problem is that these criteria still do not actually measure teaching and not even come close to assessing the quality of impact. I hence reiterate with this that rankings are no tool to assess or inform students about quality of education.
When it comes to the institutions however, the European Students’ Unions is also asking to revise the evaluation methods for career progress.
Why would a teacher these days invest time in teaching innovation, in getting extra training for the teaching mission, and in the teaching mission itself, when his or her academic progress is in most cases depending on the research performance and output?
Only by evaluating the fulfillment of the teaching mission and allowing time for teaching innovation, teachers will be able to devote themselves more to this than to their research careers. Only by valuing the teaching mission more than we do today, we will be able to balance the activities of the teacher, and create time to foster the first sparks of active citizenship in the classroom.
We furthermore need to keep investing in student and staff mobility, as the cross-cultural exchange that takes place in a mobility period and the increased tolerance it brings along, cannot be taught in any other form of education.
Atypically, I don’t even have to talk that much about the importance of student participation in higher education, as the Minister for once did that for us yesterday, but it is obvious that the only way we’ll keep our higher education institutions sensitive to these societal frustrations and the only way we can find acceptance for the much needed university reforms is by listening to and working with students in the governance of our universities.
With education on the macro-level being the lighthouse for what goes right and wrong in our societies, for what history has taught us and with education on the micro-level bringing forward active citizens that question the way society is being run and have the courage to do it better themselves, our democracy should know more active involvement.
ESU believes the Council of Europe can be crucial in pushing for this towards its member states, and should be the first to protect and support both the macro and the micro level tasks of higher education. We will not experience true democracy, we will not be able to enjoy our human rights and the rule of law if it is not passed through and safeguarded by our higher education systems. It has been the origin and will be the savior of it.
Ira Harkavy cut to the chase yesterday by saying : no democratic schooling system, no democratic society. I would go even a step further saying: no active and mobile students, no active and tolerant citizens.
Thank you for your attention.