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FORTY-SIXTH
SESSION OF THE
INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE
ON EDUCATION
"Education for
all for learning to live together":
contents and learning
strategies - problems and solutions
 Geneva,
5-8 September 2001  |
Netforum | |||
| What
is the ICE? |
Project BRIDGE |
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| Background information | Parallel
events& Press releases |
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| Working Documents | National
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| Final
report & Conclusions |
Messages of ministers of education | |||
Parallel events & Press releases
Special meeting chaired by the Director-General of UNESCO 12.09.2001 - UNESCO Press Release The Comenius Medal 07.09.2001 - SWISSINFO Special events : exhibitions, presentations of programmes on the website, videos, projects 07.09.2001UNESCO - Press Release
UNESCO Comenius Medal awarded to leaders in literacy and educationSenior Executive Seminar for Ministers of Education
05.09.2001- UNESCO Press Release
Delegates from 180 countries to examine new challenges, "best practices" in educationUN Girls' Education Initiative 04.09.2001 - TAGEBLATT
Une conférence internationale de l'éducation cette semaine à Genève17.08.2001 - IBE Presse Release
What is the responsibility of education in today's world?
On Saturday 8 September, the Director-General of UNESCO chaired a special meeting on The Involvement of Society in Action for Education for All.
The theme for the Special Meeting, The Involvement of Civil Society in Education for All, reflected the overriding importance which the Director-General of UNESCO attaches to the role of non-governmental and other civil society organizations in the Education for All processes and movement. Education for All will not be successful unless all EFA partners and actors are mobilized and empowered to play their role in a movement that rests on a solid democratic foundation.
The 46th Session of the International Conference on Education (ICE) on the theme Education for All for Learning to Live Together: Contents and Learning Strategies, Problems and Solutions, explored this fundamental notion through its two core axes related to education, democracy and social cohesion (citizenship and identity/diversity) and to education, the distribution of knowledge and the future of schools (languages, scientific knowledge/ethics and the digital divide), respectively. The debate on mobilizing the actors and partnerships constituted the bridge to the Special Meeting which discussed three country cases of government-civil society co-operation which can be claimed to provide good practices that have not been otherwise highlighted in the ICE Conference. The Special Meeting focused on the involvement of civil society in policy formation processes understood more broadly than the development of specific (EFA) plans. This was discussed through country experiences from sub-Saharan Africa (Prof. C. Ameyaw-Akumfi, Hon. Minister of Education and Ms Georgina Quaisie, Action Aid, Ghana) , South Asia (Mr L. P. Debcote, Secretary, Ministry of Education and Dr Bal Gopal Baidya, South Asia Partnership, Nepal) and a least developed country (Dr Abou Ghanim Fadhel, Hon. Minister of Education and Dr Abdullah Mubarek Al Ghaithi, Teachers' Union, Yemen) .
Each country delegation, which consisted of a high-level government representative and a high-level NGO representative, addressed the same question: Based on the experiences in your country, what are the preconditions for the successful inclusion of civil society in policy formulation, planning and action related to Education for All? The three keynote addresses were followed by a response by Fred van Leeuwen, General Secretary of Education International, the world's largest federation of educators. The meeting was chaired, opened and closed by the Director-General of UNESCO.
Address pronounced by Mr Koïchiro Matsuura Director-General of UNESCO at the opening of the session
The Comenius Medal, created jointly in 1992 by the Ministry of National Education, Youth and Sport of the Czech Republic and UNESCO, and intended to recognize innovatory initiatives and achievements in the field of research and educational renewal, was awarded on the evening of Thursday 6 September by the Assistant Director-General for education of UNESCO to the winners selected from individual educators, groups of educators or institutions. The Ministry of National Education, Youth and Sport of the Czech Republic, Mr. Eduard Zeman, was present at the ceremony.
More information in UNESCO Press Release No. 2001-94 2001
Further information about the Comenius Medal.Special events took place during the Conference: exhibitions, presentations of programmes on the website, the video “Expériences éducatives pour apprendre à vivre ensemble”, etc.
The IBE’s BRIDGE Project will was in evidence during the Conference. This is a self-managed project carried out by the IBE’s multicultural team of young professionals. It has identified "best practices" in education concerning the six themes of the ICE workshops. The selection criteria for the experiments identified are: (a) their connection with the themes of the ICE; (b) their originality; (c) the fact that they will have been evaluated externally; and (d) their ability to be reproduced in other countries or regions.
Further information on the BRIDGE Project.In parallel with the Conference’s work, various meetings were held on the fringes of the ICE. Outlines of two of them can be find below :
Senior Executive Seminar for Ministers of Education
UN Girls' Education Initiative__________________________________________________________________________
Senior Executive Seminar for Ministers of Education
Geneva, 4 September 2001The UNESCO Education Sector, together with the UNESCO Regional Office for Africa (BREDA) and the International Institute for Capacity Building in Africa (IICBA) organised a seminar for African Ministers of Education, held in Geneva on 4 September 2001. The aim of this meeting was to enable Ministers to share valuable experiences on critical challenges in their day-to-day work whilst having an opportunity to examine the research and development work that gone into these specific areas. The theme for the first meeting was "Leadership for Educational Change", with special emphasis on the nature of political leadership, and its interface with technical and professional leadership.
The meeting was piggy-backing on the International Conference on Education held in Geneva from 5 to 8 September 2001. African Governments, and more specifically African Ministers of Education, face many common problems and challenges. By establishing a mechanism for sharing both positive and negative experiences, Ministers will be able to avoid "re-inventing the wheel".
The meeting concentrated on the types of political skills and work required to enable education to gain greater support within government, including issues related to how to increase support within Cabinet and Parliament, and how to utilise the mass media effectively.
Ministers had valuable contributions to make vis-à-vis how they have worked with international organisations, including with the Bretton Wood institutions. It was agreed that although donor funding for education constituted only 2% of the total funding for education, nevertheless this funding can play a critically important role in terms of allow countries to embark on innovations such as the introduction of new technologies into the education system. Donor organisations were now much readier to dialogue with Governments on the details of educational policies and implementation programmes. The imposition of difficult conditionalities by donors on recipient countries was no longer acceptable. However it was essential for Governments to have very clear as well as cost effective and practical Action Plans on which they could base their negotiations with multilateral and bilateral agencies. Without such plans, it is possible for Governments to be pulled in different directions by outsiders, who, in the final analysis, may have no responsibility for implementation.
Another critical challenge discussed in the meeting was the training of media personnel to be effectively articulate on education issues and in a way that reaches a cross-section of the society. Without sound knowledge on the subject matter, the media’s coverage of the technical issues ends up being superfluous and frequently shallow. This leads to failure to capture the creative imagination of listeners, viewers or readers, and to wrath of officials, including Ministers. The media is a critical tool for gaining support for education, and for building up a consensus on education. In particular it was agreed that education should be above politics and above political parties, as it is essential for all political parties to agree on the critical importance of education and on the direction of educational development in their country. Thus one of the Minister's most critical challenges is to build up this national consensus.
The meeting recommended to create a focal point in each the Ministry of Education, deliberately set up to formulate and disseminate information to the media, and even to assist in the process of packaging such information. Participant called on a sustained involvement of the media in every stage of the processes of formulating, implementing and monitoring education policies. For more information, please contact Fay Chung, Director UNESCO International Institute for Capacity Building in Africa at: fchung@unesco-iicba.org
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UN Girls' Education Initiative
Geneva, 7 September 2001The UNESCO's Division of Basic Education organised an informal consultation on the United Nations' Girls' Education Initiative held on 7 September. The purpose of this meeting was to introduce the initiative to participants at the 46 session of the International Conference on Education, and to present the UNESCO's working document on Gender Equality in Non formal Basic Education, which is part of UNESCO's contribution to the UNGEI.
UNESCO briefed the participants as to how the initiative was conceived as the UN System-wide collaborative programme. The initiative intends to improve the quality and availability of girl's education through partnership of different entities within and outside of the UN System, and was envisaged as an integral and essential element in the global effort for poverty reduction and social development. Fourteen UN agencies and entities are participating in this initiative. The strategic objective of the UNGEI called for building political and resource commitments, ending the gender gap and gender discrimination within education systems, helping girl's education in crisis or conflict situation. A number of countries were identified to be most challenging where the initiative's efforts should be concentrated.
As part of contribution to the UNGEI, UNESCO intends to compliment and enrich the UNGEI by promoting gender equality and paying special attention to the non-formal basic education whilst based on the situational review on the status of non-formal education for girls and women since Jomtien.
Then, participants analysed the strategic framework, which guides the UNESCO's educational activities for girls and women in the field of non-formal education from two conceptual pillars i.e. « gender perspective » and « enlarged vision of basic education ». They also discussed the three priority areas where strategic interventions are particularly needed, including the promotion of integration or linkages between formal and non-formal education systems, the advocacy of policy changes and the support for research and surveys for policy making and programme development. They raised a number of important issues such as necessity of further emphasis on human right approach, need of strong political commitment, analysis on costs for schooling, school drop outs, transition to secondary school, low school attendance of boys, low funding level for non-formal education for women, need to support gender sensitive teaching materials, co-ordination and co-operation between different agencies, post conflict situation which cuts the multiplier effects and diminish sustainability, promotion of inter-regional and north-south co-operation and experience exchanges, more proper resource distribution, cultural sensitivity, cultural constraints, misinterpretation of religious teachings, and local contexts and relevance, training and education for women in expert-oriented industries, questions of women immigrants, absence of gender desegregated data, safety in schools awareness raising of teachers and many more.
12.09.2001 UNESCO Press Release No. 2001-96
Education ministers call for reforms to boost quality education
Geneva, September 8 - 80 education ministers and some 600 delegates from 127 nations today called for education reform, notably a better policy dialogue with civil society, a greater involvement of teachers in education policy-making, and a bolder set of actions to close the gap between quantitative advances in school enrollment and qualitative improvements in teaching.
The 46th International Conference on Education (ICE) -- the first to be convened in five years -- closed today with the adoption of a four-page document that illustrates the need to boost the quality of teaching in the face of scientific and technological advances, multiculturalism and globalization.
The ICE “conclusions and proposals for action” notably calls for the training of education decision-makers to discuss and harmonize policy formulation with other actors -- notably civil society organizations (CSOs) - in order to best identify common goals, to broaden consensus and to mobilize productive partnerships.
UNESCO Director-General Koïchiro Matsuura today advocated an expanded role for CSOs in a speech at the opening of a “Special Session on the Involvement of Civil Society in Education for All”.
In his address to the education ministers and delegates, Mr Matsuura decried the “ideas gap” between states and civil society and illustrated the role that CSOs play as innovators, informed critics, advocates, and alternative service providers in education. He outlined UNESCO’s actions over the past year to try to build “a new culture of policy dialogue” involving CSOs and NGOs as full “policy partners” alongside UNESCO’s 188 Member States.
In addition to pledging a broader cooperation in education policy-making, the ministers and delegates stressed the need to reshape and update their school curricula to reflect:
- the economic and social changes set in motion by globalization, migration and cultural diversity;
- the ethical dimensions of scientific and technological progress;
- the contributions that can result from integrating technologies into the learning process; the need to prepare societies for a global era of communication, not just in official national languages but in indigenous and foreign languages;
- the need to develop school curricula that best ensure relevance at the local, national and international level.
The final conference document urges policy-shapers to facilitate a genuine involvement by teachers and students in decision-making through training and other means, and advocates practical research, curriculum development and teaching methodologies related to the conference’s unifying theme: “Learning to Live Together”.
UNESCO’s Geneva-based International Bureau of Education organized the ICE meeting from 5-8 September. The conference’s conclusions and proposals will next be presented at the 31st session of UNESCO’s General Conference (15 October to 3 November 2001).
07.09.2001 SWISSINFO : La Suisse reste fidèle à ses principes dans l’éducation
07.09.2001 UNESCO Press Release No. 2001-94
UNESCO Comenius Medal awarded to leaders in literacy and education
Geneva, September 6 - Integrating disabled children into a mainstream Bulgarian school, building the first pan-African teachers organization, sending thousands of university student volunteers to work in Brazil's slums, UNESCO today honoured these and other initiatives around the world at the presentation of the 2001 UNESCO Comenius Medals.
John Daniel, head of UNESCO's Education Sector, and Pieter de Meijer, president of the International Bureau of Education (IBE) Council, presented the medals to eight laureates and institutions in a ceremony at the 46th International Conference on Education, a four-day meeting attended by 80 Ministers of Education and some 800 teachers and delegates from 180 countries.
At the award ceremony, Mr Daniel called the denial of basic education to hundreds of millions of people "the greatest moral challenge of our time". He said that one in four adults are illiterate and that one third of all children below the age of six do not receive early childhood education.
The 2001 Comenius Medal went to the following laureates:
Founded in 1923, Bulgaria's Atanas Bourov machine-building vocational school is the first in Bulgaria where disabled children have been integrated successfully into a mainstream school. Beginning with the 1999-2000 school year, 75 disabled students were integrated into the school after parents could find no other opportunities for their children to continue their studies.
The Comunidade Solidária project of Brazil was cited for combating poverty and social exclusion through two flagship programmes. Universidade Solidária engages university students in community work in Brazil's poorest neighbourhoods. By the end of 2001, the initiative will have counted the participation of more than 12,000 students from 160 universities. Alfabetização Solidária is a national movement to eradicate illiteracy.
The Life Science Project 1990-2000 of the Namibian Ministry of Basic Education and Culture was cited for being a "spearhead" of national educational reform and a rare example of an initiative where "classroom practice has influenced policy and curriculum development". The project has trained 1,800 science teachers at the junior secondary level, through the support of DANIDA and co-implemented by IBIS, a Danish NGO.
Sook Jong Lee of the Republic of Korea is one of the world's leading scholars on Jan Amos Comenius. In a speech at the ceremony, Mr Lee highlighted the "incomparable contributions" of the 17th century Czech humanist and theologian, a homeless refugee who went on to author nearly 200 books and to promote lasting reforms in education and society.
Mohammed Abdul Kader Ahmed of Bahrain was cited for his "modern methods in teaching Arabic language to non-native speakers." He is the author of more than forty books on pedagogy and curriculum development in the Arab world.
Thomas Ango Bediako of Ghana is a co-founder of the All-Africa Teacher's Organization and initiated the launch of the Pan-African Centre to provide services to teacher's organizations in Africa. Mr Ango Bediako currently is the African regional coordinator for Education International, the world's largest educators' federation.
Dr Pablo Latapí Sarre of Mexico was cited as "one of the founding fathers of educational research in Latin America." He founded the first educational journal in Mexico and was one of the leading figures behind the establishment of the Citizen's Observatory of Education (Observatorio Ciudadano de Educación) and the Centro de Estudios Educativos.
A posthumous medal was awarded to Yves Brunsvick of France, a fervent advocate of new teaching methods for French as a second language during his 30-year teaching career at the Sorbonne. Mr Brunsvick, a former president of the IBE Council, also served as secretary general of the French National Commission to UNESCO from 1958-1990.
The Comenius Medal was established in 1992 by the government of the Czech Republic and UNESCO to honour contributions to teaching excellence and to highlight the originality or effectiveness of pedagogical methods.
Delegates from 180 countries to examine new challenges, "best practices" in education
When education ministers and delegates from more than 180 nations convene to discuss new challenges and critical policy choices at the 46th International Conference on Education (5-8 September 2001, Geneva), they can look back on a past decade shaped by both positive and negative trends in education.
* Since 1990, the world's illiterate population has declined only slightly from 895 million to 875 million today. If the status quo in education policy continues, one in every ten young adults (15-24 years old) will be illiterate in ten years time.
* Donor aid devoted to education accounts for 2% of education spending worldwide. Between 1990 and 1997, donor aid for education actually declined (from US$3.64 billion to US$3.55 billion).
* The UN estimates that, on average, an additional $7 billion dollars per year must be spent over the next decade in order to educate all the children in the world - less than the amount Europeans spend annually on ice cream.
* In South Asia, nearly three-in-five women are still illiterate today (compared to one-in-three men). Of the estimated 875 million illiterates worldwide, some 580 million (or two-thirds) are women and girls.
Since 1990 several positive trends also have emerged:
* Primary net enrolment ratios in the Latin American and Caribbean region have risen from 84% in 1990 to 94% in 1998, in the process halving the out-of-school child population from 11.4 million to 4.8 million. During this same period, developing countries as a whole increased net enrolment for children of primary school age from 78% to 82%.
* Over the past decade, the working-age population (15-64 years) in every region of the world has expanded more rapidly than the population of children below the age of 15. As fertility rates continue to fall over the coming decades, many countries in both the developed and developing regions will have an opportunity to better meet the educational requirements of school-age children.
* Since 1990, literacy rates for women and girls in sub-Saharan Africa have risen from 41% to 54% of the population, while in Arab States they have climbed from 37% to 50%.
* Among 15-24 year olds, little or no gender disparity exists in literacy rates in Latin America & the Caribbean, East Asia and Oceania as well as the Europe and North America regions. In addition, women now make up nearly half (48%) of students enrolled in higher education worldwide.
This year's International Conference on Education - organized by the International Bureau of Education (IBE) of UNESCO - will draw attention to some 100 "Best Practices" in education from around the world, particularly initiatives that might be transferable from one region or context to another. These include South Africa's "40 schools project" to directly assist victims of violence and involve both teachers and students in the promotion of national reconciliation; Canada's school curriculum for Nunavut, a newly self-governing Inuit territory; and Malaysia's Mobile Internet Unit's effort to reach even the country's most rural and remote communities.
The unifying theme of the conference is: "Education for All for Learning to Live Together". Conference delegates - including around 80 Ministers of Education - will examine and debate practical policy options on six timely themes:
1. Adapting school curricula to the ethical dimensions of rapid scientific and technological advances. A workshop - organized by UNESCO and the Cité des sciences et de l'industrie, La Villette, Paris - will further discuss science education reform, basic science teaching, methodologies for interdisciplinarity, and other themes.
2. Designing curricula to combat social exclusion and violence. The Ministry of Education of Argentina and the Institut Universitaire d'Etudes du Développment (IUED, Geneva) will organize a workshop to discuss how the content and processes of formal education may relate to social exclusion and patterns of violence.
3. Introducing educational initiatives that narrow the digital divide. A workshop - funded by the governments of Norway and Finland - will advocate policy choices that narrow the gap between the information rich and poor, and explore the potential new technologies have in improving learning, teaching, quality, management and delivery of education.
4. Integrating language-teaching policies and other strategies to broaden understanding. A workshop - financed by the Ministry of Education of the Netherlands - will highlight ways to balance requirements for mono-lingual national curricula with the challenge of improving minority and foreign-language teaching at school.
5. Shaping curricula to recognize cultural and linguistic diversity. A workshop - organized with the Intercultural Bilingual Education Training Programme for the Andean Countries - will focus on the integration of cultural diversity into the teaching of common values and democratic citizenship.
6. Citizenship education: learning at school and in society. A workshop - funded by the Danish Ministry of Education - will examine the role of schools in preparing young people for active participation in and analytical judgement of the democratic process, as well as education's role in defending common values enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
The conference also aims to focus the attention of policy-makers on a global action plan that commits governments to carry forward the most ambitious inter-UN agency campaign ever launched to eradicate illiteracy and achieve universal, quality Education for All (EFA) targets by 2015, in line with a framework for action adopted in April 2000 by more than 180 nations at the World Education Forum in Dakar, Senegal.
UNESCO Director-General Koïchiro Matsuura will chair a special meeting, beginning at 9.30 a.m. on September 8, on the involvement of civil society in promoting Education for All.
TAGEBLATT 04.09.2001 Une conférence internationale de l'éducation cette semaine à Genève What is the responsibility of education in today's world?
In recent years, we have been able to look at the legacy of the twentieth century: it was a period in which humanity killed some 180 million individuals in various wars and conflicts. The First and Second World Wars, genocide in Rwanda and the civil wars in the Balkans, the Gulf War, massacres carried out by Latin American dictatorships - these are but a few examples. However, throughout the world the twentieth century was also a period of immense advances in the schooling of children and young people. Faced with this contradiction, what can we do to improve the quality of education for all to live together in peace?
Continuing a tradition that began between the First and the Second World Wars, Ministers of Education from over 180 states will meet in the framework of the UNESCO's International Conference on Education, whose forty-sixth session will take place in Geneva, on 5-8 September 2001, organized by the International Bureau of Education (IBE). The ministers, delegates and observers will exchange their experiences, their problems and their solutions. They will discuss issues related to citizenship, the search for social cohesion, the tension between promoting universal values and cultural diversity, learning languages for better communication and mutual understanding, the new ethical challenges of the natural sciences, and the opportunities and risks resulting from including new technologies as tools of the knowledge society.
When deciding upon the structure and the methodology of the Conference, the IBE Council wished to limit as much as possible the "ritual" in order to favour exchanges and dialogue. Thus, the work will be organized mainly in the form of discussion panels in the framework of two major debates and six workshops. The moderators and panellists coming from the worlds of politics, academic research, journalism and civil society will lead the debates open to all participants to the Conference. Recognized and promoted by the organizers of this Conference, the voice of educators will be given its rightful place.
The Conference will be preceded by a press conference given by Martine Brunschwig Graf, President of the Department of Public Instruction of the Republic and Canton of Geneva, John Daniel, Assistant Director-General of UNESCO for Education, and Cecilia Braslavsky, Director of the IBE. It will take place at 9:30 am, September 4, 2001, at the Palace of Nations.
More than 100 messages by Ministers coming from all corners of the world will be available already on the first day of the Conference. Working documents and "best practices" used in various countries appear on the Conference's web site. In the Entrance Hall of the International Conference Centre, there will be an exhibition of UNESCO books, documents, CD-ROMs and videos. There will be also a special presentation of the IBE's BRIDGE project. Several other organizations, including Education International and UNAIDS, will also present their materials.
During the Conference, the Press Contact Point will be located in the Office E122, Level -1 of the International Conference Centre.
For further information please contact Mrs Nadia Sikorsky or the Secretariat of the International Conference on Education: International Bureau of Education P.O.Box 199 CH-1211 Geneva 20 Tel. (41 22) 917 78 25 Fax (41 22) 917 78 01.
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