European school traditions...

On Monday we were supposed to meet Tove Heidemann. But something was wrong in the schedule so we got an extra hour to get rid of our morning fatigue. Which was to be honest not the worst idea. But finally we started into our lecture about different European school traditions with learning about the European Commission's goal to indicate European core values and a common history and culture. On the other hand we learned about historical and geographical borderlines, e.g. the "limes" (lat.: borderline farest away from Rome) along the Rhine and the Danube, deviding Europe into a northern and a southern part. We came across differences in culture, society, religion, and so on. As these were more generalized assumptions we afterwards turned towards the rather local level, i.e. the schools in the different countries. Tove presented us the theory of Edgar Schein who seperated the organization of school culture into three levels:

Level 1: Artefacts (what you can observe): e.g. appearance, equipment, cantine, subjects, interaction, behaviour
Level 2: Exposed values (what you can explain): e.g. rationalities, reasons for organization, aims
Level 3: Basic assumptions (what you cannot observe / explain): e.g. interpretations of values and artefacts, main tasks, how is "learning" looked upon

After this rather theoretical part we made a short journey to France, Italy, Portugal, Spain and Belgium (encyclopedic approach), Great Britain (humanistic approach) and Germany, The Natherlands and Scandinavia (naturalistic approach). The data presented was taken from the book "Britain and a single market Europe" by Martin McLean but unfortunately almost 20 years old. Therefor it has to be critically questioned whether these data is still valid today or whether things have changed. The data was as follows:

encyclopedic: Uniformity (knowledge about as many issues as possible, centralized curriculum and tests), rationality (no emotions, logical way of thinking, France, science, history and philosophy), elitism (competition rather than cooperation, universities and grand ecoles)

humanistic: high moral standard (ideal of the gentleman, empathy, sense of duty, brotherhood), individualism (close contact between teachers and students, individual learning speed), specialisation (choice of 2-3 subjects to focus on at the age of 16)

naturalistic: community needs (streaming of pupils, every job has its function and own dignity, hard work, economical behaviour), imitating of parents' way of socialising (parents have much influence, learning by imitation, process as important as product, skills-oriented)

Many of those values and strategies may have disappeared or been altered over the years. Thus it's difficult to actually work with this data. But nevertheless it indicates that there have been differences between countries and their concepts of education. In how far these differences still exist could be an interesting topic to do research in.

A very controversial question came up towards the end of our meeting: there are schools for pupils with special needs in Denmark but no (or very few) schools for highly gifted pupils. What is the reason for that? Do not pupils with special talents or above average intelligence also deserve an adequate education? We again mentioned the "jante" law - which I personally think to be a questionable value after reading the ten rules - but is it a sufficient explanation to "suppress" talent? In my opinion talent should be advanced. Not to educate a superior elite of pupils but to help gifted pupils to use their talents to support and improve the society and to become socially capable citizens.

save the world...

On Friday we started off at 8.15 with our citizenship and globalisation course. Originally Birgitte wanted to sing some songs with us just for warming up our brains. Most of us were pretty tired and didn't really look forward to working ;-) .However we couldn't find any English songs in the songbook so we skipped the singing part and went directly to work. For homework we had prepared a short presentation about the influence of our educational systems on becoming citizens. That's what I wrote down during the presentations:We had discussed the introduction of citizenship as a subject in Denmark before, so in this respect we didn't learn anything new. But it was interesting to how the different educational systems try to compensate their "lack" of a subject citizenship. In all out countries we have aspects of citizenship included - more or less overtly expressed - in other subjects (hidden goals, cross curriculum,...).

The second part of the the lesson we spent discussing. We started with the challenges we consider to be some of the biggest today, but we soon found ourselves amid a discussion about the caricature argument, different worldviews, religious vs. democratic values and so on. During the discussion Birgitte showed us some of the caricatures that caused the crisis in 2006 which experiences a revival those days. Some of us had quite opposing opinions about these caricatures, about why they were made and about the reactions they caused. I learned that they were made because there had been increasing problems with islamic fundamentalists in Denmark. The caricatures were meant to make people aware of the problem. Flemming Rose, Jyllands-Posten's culture editor, said about this On September 30, 2005:
"The modern, secular society is rejected by some Muslims. They demand a special position, insisting on special consideration of their own religious feelings. It is incompatible with contemporary democracy and freedom of speech, where you must be ready to put up with insults, mockery and ridicule. It is certainly not always attractive and nice to look at, and it does not mean that religious feelings should be made fun of at any price, but that is of minor importance in the present context. [...] we are on our way to a slippery slope where no-one can tell how the self-censorship will end. That is why Morgenavisen Jyllands-Posten has invited members of the Danish editorial cartoonists union to draw Muhammad as they see him. [...]"
A bit later (February 19, 2006) he also explained that
"The cartoonists treated Islam the same way they treat Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism and other religions. And by treating Muslims in Denmark as equals they made a point: We are integrating you into the Danish tradition of satire because you are part of our society, not strangers. The cartoons are including, rather than excluding, Muslims."

Personally I know that these are caricatures and that they are supposed to show contents in a highly exaggerated way. But one the other hand I ask myself if it's the right way to draw a person with a bomb in his head and the Shahada (the Islamic creed) on top of it (I don't know for sure if it's really the shahada because I'm not that good in Arabic, but to me it looks very similar). In my opinion that is an insult to all Muslims and I can actually understand that it caused indignation within the Islamic world. But I'm certain that this again is not a reason to start riots and violence resulting in more than 100 deaths and setting fire to Danish Embassies and storming European buildings.

We talked for a long time about the different values within societies and if one societiy can assert a claim to superiority to others. Another important question was whether democratic values are more important than religious beliefs. I think not all of us were really interested in these topics but to me it was quite important to discuss these matters. In the end we didn't reach a consensus and we certainly didn't save the world that day but after all I found the lesson very informative and interesting (I think more than any other lesson before during the last weeks).

I arranged a small list of links you can visit when you are interested in the discussion. The first one is a link to the twelve caricatures published on September 30, 2005. The second one is a wikipedia article about the caricature argument (that's also where my quotes are taken from). The third one in an article about the shahada.

http://www.citybeat.de/news/2070231/die-12-mohammed-karikaturen.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jyllands-Posten_Muhammad_cartoons_controversy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shahadah