Education: a commitment, seventeen years later

In 1988, we thought that the great challenge for us was to keep up the effort to let the world set our agenda and that, if we were very attentive, we would be able to listen to God speaking to us. ”. (International Education Commission, (IEC) Education: a commitment, Rome, April 1988, p.20). That was only seventeen years ago, but the world has changed its agenda. God has opened new channels of communication, and has found new ways to remind us that our mission is to be salt of the earth and light for the world, thus showing God’s love for humanity and for the world that shelters it.

Why did I choose the ICE document as a point of reference for a new relaunching of what we have called “our educational service”? Because, I see in spite of my personal bias, that this service is a new way of making the way we listen become concrete. For the first time, education became the center of attention of a considerable number of rscj and lay people, organized by communities and guided by provincial education committees (PEC). More than two hundred people participated in PECs. The IEC gave an impetus to the work, collected and organized initial material, returned it to the provinces through regional meetings, recollected this work which included new input and presented the end result as a working paper, so that we could continue our reflection. This work was also an important input for the General Chapter of the same year. From the early days of the Society, groups of experts developed various Plans of Studies. These Plans had a normative character. In 1978 an international educational commission systematized the reports of the provinces in fifteen days and handed over the document to an Assembly of Provincials. They produced the document “Education for justice from faith”. This was an important preliminary work but I think the real turning point came in 1988. It was at that moment that we lived the fact that the future of the Society is in the hands of each one of us.

What has changed in these 17 years? Let us think back.  The Berlin wall fell, the two German states became one, the USSR disintegrated, the Warsaw Pact and Apartheid ended, Yugoslavia split violently, Czechoslovakia was divided in two countries, there were two wars in Iraq, others in Rwanda, Burundi, Afghanistan. Hong Kong went back to China and the Canal to Panama. The two-superpower system collapsed, large economic and political blocks or regions were formed, the UN increased its participation in the control of more than a dozen conflicts. Nations became more dependent on foreign forces, and superpowers paid little or no heed to the UN.  Social problems took on a global dimension, AIDS became a pandemic, gaps of all kinds grew wider. Drugs and terrorism became international. Paulo Freire, Therese of Calcutta and Julius Nyerere died. A group of the poor of the earth and their friends think that another world is possible, become organized, take steps through World Social Forums.

There are other changes too. Knowledge grows by leaps and bounds, the explosion in scientific thinking produces thousands of products, information technologies (IT’s) reach link growing numbers of the world’s population. The post modern trend questions the body of knowledge and brings to light areas that had been forgotten, while at the same time fragmenting knowledge. The holistic approach tries to rebuild it and recover its unity, incorporating the post modern input. The world and its knowledge becomes more complex everyday and keep changing at a great speed. The number of scientists who claim that it is necessary to develop complex processes of thought in as many people as possible also grows. At the same time, the presence of millions of illiterate persons in this XXI century challenges us.
 
Do we believe, or not, that this historic mega avalanche of global proportions is changing the agenda that we had in 1988?  It is true that this agenda was drawn up some time ago but in these seventeen years we have seen it swept away before our own eyes. Bill Gates is asking to restructure the high school system in the United States, claiming that it is obsolete because it was designed fifty years ago. Matsuura, at a gathering of experts last September, opened for debate the appearance of new ways of ignorance and the need of new forms of literacy to address them. He pointed out ignorance of diversity, of the other, of the future and of ethics. Elena Martín has made some interesting statements over the PISA (Program for Indicators of Student Achievement) test of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in 2001: the students whose mothers have not completed high school obtained 44 points less in comprehensive reading than those whose mothers did complete high school. In other areas of school performance, each year of additional education of a parent resulted in 4.7 more points for their children. (Cfr. Elena Martín. La evaluación de los aprendizajes: complementariedad de la evaluación interna y externa. Universidad Autónoma de Madrid.).

During these years we have also become more conscious of the fact that education is not an isolated process. That education does not work, or that it works badly if we do not pay attention to nutrition, health, shelter, clothes, work, defense and development. The number of municipalities that have become self-educating cities has grown in several countries. Finland seems to have the greatest number of these cities; it also achieved the highest score in the PISA test of reading comprehension. The next step would be to succeed in creating a country which educates itself through its municipalities. And, at the end, a human society that educates itself at the level of planet.
In this context, we educators would become a “union of professionals”, that would facilitate everyone’s learning including our own, mediators between peoples and culture in its rich and splendid diversity.  We are aware that we are part of this group, a group that demands that we develop ourselves fully in community, in a community of sisters and brothers because we are children of the same God.

We have, then, a sketch of a tentative “new agenda” that we can discuss among ourselves and with others: to collect and to systematize our new lived experiences, since all is part of the new. We need to be in communion between ourselves and with others, attentive to new calls. We must review all of our educational work in order to be aware of what kind of history, geography, mathematics or music, is given to the pupils in our classrooms, what is the atmosphere of our institutions or programs,  and what type of management should serve the new agenda.

As for channels of listening, I think our Society has already opened the doors: networks and meetings of persons involved in formal and non-formal education, general and by regions, the international website which allows us to communicate among ourselves, the Sophia Commission and the NGO representative at the UN. Building the future is really in the hands of each one of us to the extent in which we accept our responsibility in communion.

How, then, has this historic mega-avalanche changed our service of education?
What is the new agenda for education, especially for Sacred Heart education? What are the new channels of listening that the Lord has opened for us?

In conclusion? The web that the Lord offers us as a new channel for listening, can help is to discover an agenda that is constantly renewed, and to work together and with others, always attentive to the signs of the times. Our web. The possibility to listen to each other and to communicate with each other from pole to pole.  The process of reflections launched by the IEC can be taken up, time and again, by all of us.