EUROPEAN MANIFESTO                                               FOR EDUCATION AND CULTURE

The undersigned teachers, intellectuals and citizens, worried about the situation of teaching and culture in the European Union

DECLARE TO THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT:

1. That the education system must have as its main purpose to provide the population with the highest possible level of culture, and not just to give basic schooling to a particular age group; that in order to make learning possible the education system must instil the values of individual effort and respect for the teacher; that the education system must be directed towards an assessment of each student’s actual knowledge.

2. That it is in this respect essential to give children a sufficiently sound education from the beginning of schooling; furthermore, that raising the cultural level of the population requires the reinforcement both of humanistic and of scientific learning in secondary education.

3. That the imposition by some states of education policies based on the wrongly called “modern pedagogy” has had no other effect than to hamper and undermine the transmission of knowledge; that the imposition of such notions as “constructivism,” under the appearance of innovation, hides contempt for the basic elements of learning and for the students who are deprived of them.

4. That primary education (education in the fundamentals of knowledge) should be clearly distinguished from secondary education (acquisition of scientific and humanistic knowledge); that secondary education must be officially recognised in all the countries of the EU, must have adequate length and must be an entity of its own, instead of merely giving access to university or vocational education.

5. That the validation of knowledge across member states ought to be based on the individual assessment of learning by teachers and by the states themselves, by means of general exams at the end of the secondary educational stages.

Consequently, the undersigned

REQUEST THAT THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT URGE THE MEMBER STATES TO:

•	Take into account the educational proposals of teachers, the real professionals at all academic levels, instead of imposing on them –often in spite of their own teaching freedom – a useless task of continuous programming, and enact those laws necessary to guarantee proper respect towards the teachers.

•	Give priority to education in core subjects such as the native language and Mathematics from the beginning of schooling; promote an adequate timetable and an effective instruction in the knowledge related to those areas.

•	Guarantee a sound secondary education in Science and in the Humanities which favours the development of a critical and enlightened spirit through the shared tradition of European knowledge, in contrast with the postulates of the “Lisbon strategy”, that conceive of education as a “service” and of knowledge as a loose compound of “competences”.

•	Guarantee, as part of the process of European convergence, a common general Baccalaureate with a minimum length of three-years, whose qualification should be validated by the Educational Administrations through an objective assessment of the students’ knowledge, independent of their study centres and of their continuous assessment.

APS (Associación de profesores de secundaria) - Sauver les lettres – Reconstruire l’école – GRIP ( Groupe de Recherche Interdisciplinaire sur les Programmes) - Sociedad Española de Estudios Clásicos - AESPI - Associazione Europea Scuola e Professionalità Insegnante.

European manifesto for education and culture
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