The pillar of education is trust in youth

Abstract

Moving from a critical consideration of the politics of the European Commission concerning instruction in the last 20 years, the presentation highlights the contradictions in interpreting the value of education. Due to the prevailing interest of the financial ideologues stressing competition, Delors as Head of the European Union tried to draw the attention of economists toward the field of education, stressing the relevance of education for economic competition. Later on, as head of UNESCO Committee for Education, he tried to bring the attention back on the true value of education, but the damage was done. Curiously, in the UNESCO book, he used as mainframe the famous La Fontaine/Aesop’s fable (n. XLII) about the Farmer and his sons, emphasizing the need to better listen to the youngsters and to educate them to the values and social meaning of non-alienated work. However, the fable implies a pedagogical contradiction, because education requires trust and not escamotage. The deep anti-pedagogical result was to allow economists to think about education as just as a way to improve human capital.

Keywords

• Competition vs cooperation
• work
• social values
• anti-pedagogical results