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THE EUROPEAN COMMISSIONER responsible for education and training, Viviane Reding, recently gave a speech in which she asserted her attitude to EU policy. Addressing the European Centre for Public Affairs, she stressed the idea of lifelong learning. She started by outlining the range and success of the current EU programmes in education and training. Under Socrates, she said, 'almost half a million university students have been able to spend time studying abroad; professional development opportunities have been offered to nearly 100,000 lecturers and teachers;- getting on for 10,000 schools are involved in transnational partnership projects'. As regards the Leonardo da Vinci provision, which is concerned with education at work, 'the scale of demand has been so high that on average only about one project proposal in five could be supported from the resources available; - yet still, the programme has also been able to send almost 100,000 young people and 10,000 trainers on vocational placements and exchanges to other countries'.
However, she continued, there was much that needed to be done, 'according to a 1993 Eurostat survey only 1 in 4 people working in companies with more than ten employees had taken part in a continuing training course that year'. Also 'access to continuing training is still very unequally distributed by age, gender, qualification level and occupational status'. This situation must be remedied she insisted because 'It's not only employability that has to be continuously renewed in a knowledge-based economy, but also the capacity for effective participation and citizenship in a complex and multicultural society'. To do this we must get rid of the model of people's lives which has three stages, 'learning time (for young people, through education);- working time (adults, through paid work and/or family work); - and finally free time (senior citizens, in retirement)'.
Commissioner Reding concluded her speech with a consideration of how lifelong learning can be forwarded from the year 2000 on. The new generation of action programmes such as Socrates II and Leonardo da Vinci II will link lifelong learning with the knowledge society. She said that 'the 1990s was the decade in which we all came to agree that lifelong learning is the way forward. The next decade will be the one to move from words to action. I want to bring our Treaty provisions and our policy texts to life; I want to help to bring lifelong learning into people's real lives'
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The text of the speech(SPEECH/99/154) is |
http://europa.eu.int/rapid/cgi/rapcgi.ksh?p_ |
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