Topic: The Role of Education and Science in the Process of World Globalisation: Opportunities and Risks

Morning Session, Oct.16

Josef Jařab
Good morning Ladies and Gentlemen. Let me welcome you all to the first day of the conference of the Forum 2000 and let me welcome above all the President of the Czech Republic, Mr. Václav Havel. And it is to the President that I am glad to give the floor for the initial remarks of the conference.

Václav Havel
Ladies and Gentlemen, distinguished guests,
I would like to welcome you all to the Czech Republic, to Prague, to Prague Castle, for the 4th Forum 2000 Conference in the Spanish Hall. I would like to propose a minute’s silence in honour of all the victims of the latest Middle East conflict.
(A minute’s silence)
Thank you.
Also, I would like to excuse Mr. Babitsky who was invited but, unfortunately, has not been granted a passport by the Russian Federation - or more precisely, whose passport has been taken away.
Now, I would like to make a few improvised remarks about the focus of this Forum 2000, the 4th one. The topic of our Forum is ‘Education, Culture, Wisdom and Spiritual Values in the Age of Globalisation’. I believe that what is at stake, and what will be more and more at stake - and this is something I already mentioned yesterday - is a very open perception, understanding and search for the various connections in our world, connections that are often surprising, that often go against certain habits, stereotypes, knowledge, scientific or technological experiences. It seems to me that this will be absolutely the most important thing in the immediate future.
And what results from this?
Most of all, an appeal for humility. In this New Age era it is possible to observe a tradition of what I call the pride of reason, the pride of intellectuals, the pride of knowledge.
Somebody believes that when he has discovered that an ant is composed of molecules he has conquered the secret of the world. Then, along comes somebody who discovers that the molecule is composed of atoms, and he too believes that he has solved the secret of the world. And then comes somebody else and says this atom is composed of protons and electrons, and again this person believes that he has solved the secret of the world. Today we know that protons are composed of quarks and we do not know what quarks are composed of, but perhaps in ten years time we will know. But in not one of these phases of knowledge have we actually touched the secret of the world. Actually we have only penetrated deeper into this world, which means that the wonder of being has appeared to us clearer, richer and more structured in its miracle of being, but we have not discovered this miracle by concretely revealing these individual components of our world. And of course, the most knowledgeable of our modern scientists are aware of this, and they all feel this humility. This is the second tradition of our New Age science, next to the tradition of pride, when a scientist or intellectual believes that he has conquered the world because he has understood this or that, or described it in what is called an ‘objective way’, and that is the tradition of humility, or respect for the secrets of the world. And it seems to me that this is very important because, of course, it has its own consequences in a moral sense.
At our Forums, we have discussed, on a number of occasions, that in this era of globalisation it is most important to foster a global human responsibility for this world, an awareness of belonging to humanity, of caring for the world in which we live. The pre-requisite of an ‘elementary responsibility for the world’, which I have already talked about as being the moral minimum that different cultures or civilisations can agree on, is an attitude of humility towards the world and the miracle of being, as well as the ability to know that we don't know anything.
Thank you for your attention and let me wish you every success in this Forum, to your discussions of which I will be an active and curious participant.
Thank you.

Josef Jařab
Thank you very much for the words which have designated the framework for our discussions over the coming days and within which we should be dealing with the issues set out in the program for this year’s Forum 2000 conference. As you know, the first day is dedicated to the immense area of education. Very often we hear that this is the only hopeful gateway for humanity and the world if we are to survive and be able to live together on this planet, yet at the same time we know that we have very different understandings of the word education. The opportunities for education to become what we think it should be are very different around the world and therefore I think that the debate over the coming hours should be very, very important and relevant.

The organisers of the conference have decided that we deal with this subject in two panels - one this morning and the other in the afternoon. I will be moderating this morning’s panel. My name is Josef Jařab and my involvement in education is as a teacher, but previously, of course, as a student and even before then, as a pupil. My involvement in education is also as a politician - as a senator - and I’ve been an administrator of two universities. It is my great honour to be here today and to moderate the morning discussion. It has been decided that we will try to give some orientation to the discussion by posing one or two questions or issues, which should help refocus the discussion in case we go really very much astray, which is of course logically possible in view of the vastness of the topic. Therefore, I would like to ask Dr. Ladislav Čerych, the former Director of the Education Policy Centre at Charles University and Educational Consultant for the OECD to read the questions of the day.

Ladislav Čerych
Thank you very much Mr. Chairman. Mr. President, Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen. As you have just heard, the first day of this forum has been dedicated to the role of education in the globalisation process and to the impact of this process on education. In this brief introduction to the discussions, which is in a certain sense an innovation in the organisation of the forum, we want to put to the main speakers, moderators, panel members and the participants of the debate, a number of hopefully specific questions, to which they should, in the organisers’ view, respond either directly or indirectly, depending on the time available. In doing so, it is by no means our intention to direct anybody or prescribe anything; we simply want to achieve a certain degree of coherence in the discussions and interventions of the day and to stress the really pressing issues related to the topics of the debates.

For today the following would seem to us to be the key issues. In the first session this morning the question is ‘How does or can the globalisation process contribute to the development of education and what is its impact on this development, be it positive or negative?’ And on the other hand: ‘How can education contribute to a certain humanisation of the globalisation process?’ - a point which was really suggested already last night by President Havel. More specifically - What are the greatest potentials of globalisation for education? For example, is it the utilisation of the new information and communication technologies or the development of new supranational networks of closely related collaborating experts and institutions? Where are the main dangers and stumbling blocks of the globalisation process in education? Is it, for example, a threat to traditional values and cultural specifics of different national systems? And finally, how and in what way can spiritual values, religion and culture and arts - the other two topics of this year’s forum 2000 -contribute to the solution of the above-mentioned questions?

As concerns the afternoon session, the key question is essentially whether the globalisation process in education can help to bridge the divide between the developed and developing countries, between the North and the South, or, whether on the contrary, it widens the gap. Specifically what measures are required in this respect, both on the part of the developing as well as the developed countries, so that the existing gap might be at least gradually overcome? Can the new information and communication technologies, such as virtual universities, for example, play an important role? Can some of the existing experiences serve as model policies in this respect? And finally, the same question as in respect of the first session of the day: How and in what way can spiritual values, religion culture and the arts - the two remaining topics of this forum - contribute to the solution of the questions posed above? Thank you.

Josef Jařab
Thank you.

Now we know the questions we want to address, and I think I’d simply like to give us an idea of this morning’s session: we have one keynote speaker and six people on the panel. We do hope that we hear the keynote speaker and the panellists by the time we have coffee break and then we will have a thorough discussion of interventions by panellists and, I would also like to stress, by people from the table and from the audience, of course.

Let me then invite the keynote speaker for this panel. The keynote speaker is Professor Anthony Giddens, who is, as we know, one of the world’s leading sociologists. In this country his book, one of the bibles of sociology, was recently published in Czech translation. Professor Giddens is at the moment running one of the most important schools in the educational field, especially in the field of social and human sciences, the London School of Economics.

Anthony Giddens
Well thank you very much and let me say what a pleasure it is to be here this morning and wish everyone a happy and productive conference over the next three days. Given the title of this conference, I feel I should start by saying something briefly about the amazing history of the notion of globalisation, alluded to by President Havel yesterday in his speech. Only about ten years ago, the term globalisation was hardly used. Those of us working on the issue in the academic literature know this. You didn’t find it in the business literature, you didn’t find in the newspapers. Academics at that time were only just beginning to use the notion. Suddenly the idea of globalisation has gone from nowhere to being everywhere over such a short period. The very notion of globalisation has become globalised --I haven’t been to a single country where there isn’t an intense discussion about what globalisation is.

When a term goes from nowhere to being everywhere in such a short period of time it’s obvious that it’s going to bring in its wake an enormous controversy. There was an academic controversy, of course, about globalisation, but now as everybody knows the debate about globalisation has moved into the streets. Everyone in Prague knows this; we know it in London: we’ve had two marches against globalisation, and this has become itself a well-known global phenomenon.

Before I start talking about education, I would just like to register something about this debate, which is that in my view neither the protesters, nor the people sitting inside their marvellous conference halls, have adequately understood what the notion of globalisation should mean to us. They think that you can either be against globalisation as the people on the streets are, or they think you can be for it. To me those positions are both incoherent. Globalisation is a complex set of processes not a single one. You can’t be simply for it or against it.

We must all see that there are very positive aspects of globalising processes which we can utilise including within education, we must also all see that there are harmful and destructive ones. In my view, however, it’s an absolutely fundamental mistake to equate globalisation with the spread of the global market place, a view that I think both sides tend to hold. To me globalisation is a much, much more profound process than simply an economic one. It is driven above all by the communications revolution; the new period of globalisation is about thirty years old. You could date it, you could put a technological fix on it if you want. You could say that the current global era begins from the point at which the first effective satellite system was sent up above the Earth. The time at which you had instantaneous communication across the Earth simply changes many things right the way through from our personal lives through to global systems.

Globalisation, therefore, I believe, is all about communication, not primarily about markets or the economy. That is fundamental to understanding the role of education, in addressing it, but it’s also fundamental to assessing more generally the impact of globalisation on our lives. The best way to think what globalisation means is something like a fundamental shift in all of our basic institutions. If you go back to the late 18th century you can see that what happened then was a kind of shake-out of all basic institutions going all way the through from the family, through to sovereignty, the economy, and larger social systems. We are living through such a period of shake-out now, an overall transformation of the basic institutions of our societies, fraught with many possibilities as we know, but also fraught with dangers. The shake-out of institutions is also directly affecting education.

If I might, I would offer you a little homily about the extraordinary revolutionary nature of what is happening to education in the world. This homily concerns the fate of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The Encyclopaedia Britannica, for my generation and for 200 years before, was a kind of repository of all human knowledge, at least in the English-speaking world. It existed as twenty volumes, which you could have on your bookshelves and it seemed to be the most solid expression of what intellectual life was about, because it was a compendium of all known facts about a variety of disciplines. Optimistic salesmen would come around and try to sell an encyclopaedia on your doorstep, I don’t know if they ever succeeded in this endeavour. Within the early 1990s Microsoft introduced Encarta, a software-based encyclopaedia that completely destroyed the market of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and what seemed to be the most solid epitome of human knowledge just disappeared into thin air almost overnight.

The Encyclopaedia Britannica now only exists as an Internet-based service; all 40 million words of it are available on the Internet as a subscription service. That now forgotten figure Karl Marx said, ‘All that is solid vanishes into air’ - well, this is the nature of the economy and global system in which we are now living. There’s a little interesting twist to this tale, which is that now, the makers of the Encyclopaedia Britannica are again thinking of bringing back the big volumes. People are not really satisfied with having an encyclopaedia as a wholly Internet-based service, they want to see something solid; they don’t want everything to vanish into thin air.


Now, I would like to make five points about the future of university education based on these considerations. First of all, I run, as Professor Jařab said, what is rightly regarded as one of the best-known universities in the world. It has a brand name like the Encyclopaedia Britannica did, but I have to seriously ask myself could the fate of the Encyclopaedia Britannica befall the London School of Economics? Could the London School of Economics, which seems to be and is a well-established, traditional university, find itself translated into thin air by the impact of new communications technologies? Where is the fastest growing university in the world? Well, it’s nowhere: the fastest growing university in the world is the University of Phoenix, which is a purely cyber-based university.

All over the world cyber-based universities are springing up and bringing higher education to millions of people who never had the chance to go to a campus. Is there a future for the campus-based university? This for the first time, for the last two or three hundred years, is a real question. If I can be, if you allow me, to be a little provocative I would say, ‘No, there is not a future for the campus-based university’. This is not because the campus-based university, the traditional university, will be supplanted by Internet-based learning. Students will always want somewhere to go. You can see from the existence of this conference that people need places to go. It wouldn’t be the same if we simply communicated across the Internet. People will always want to look into the eyes of the other, to smell the sweat of the other, to be where other people are. Campus-based universities will, therefore, still exist, but they will become part of global networks. What you will find is a convergence of these two forms of education, not a rivalry between them.

In the LSE, for example, as I think in many leading universities, we’re building a global network of collaboration. We are a part of a consortium, which is marketing Internet-based higher education right across the world. This includes into poorer countries: we have a strategic target of introducing higher education into poorer parts of the world, which uses the LSE name, which allows more people actually to come to the LSE campus, but which is a network system of education. Higher education will increasingly become a globalised network, which, however, will depend on the campus-based university as the kind of node, the centre of that network. No university, which is not into this, will prosper in the future. This is the characteristic way of development, which I think at least the leading universities will follow.

Second, lifelong learning is not just a banality. If you go round the world and talk to politicians, all politicians will talk about the importance of education. Tony Blair doesn't just talk about education, he talks about education, education, education! All politicians will say that lifelong learning has to be part of education. It is more than a banality, however, because we should understand what will certainly happen - the expansion of lifelong education - not just as a response to the flexibility of the market place. Many people think that people will not stay in jobs as long as they used to do, so that’s why you need lifelong education to continually retrain them. Well, that is true, but it’s superficial. What’s happening in the world is that as a result of globalising processes, the nature of our personal lives and how we relate to them is changing. You've only got to consider, as an example, what is happening to older people. I speak as someone who is rapidly becoming an older person, so I have a stake in this. To be an older person used to be a fixed kind of status; it was linked with pensions, with retirement. Well, it isn't any longer. Old age, like so many parts of our lives, is now an open project. It is what you make of it - we know that many of the illnesses associated with old age are not associated with it at all, they are bound up with lifestyle processes. Therefore living an active life is the characteristic shift of the age. Well, education is crucial to that. So we can expect a shift to lifelong learning in education, which, however, in my view, should not be primarily vocational learning. It should persist with the traditional ideals of the University of Education being the medium of living a good life. I believe that to be fundamental to what education stands for.

Thirdly, one should recognise that the university is not just a place, not even primarily a place, where education is simply transmitted. Many people, when they think of education, think of the passing on of knowledge, the transmission of knowledge. Well, universities are far more than that. Universities are places where knowledge is produced. They are the primary arena and will remain the primary arena where knowledge is produced. The production of knowledge in a knowledge-based society is going to give universities a more central role than ever before. We can see everywhere a connection between universities, business and government, for example, which is much more open than it ever was before.

However, here is the change: universities and intellectuals no longer have a monopoly on the production of knowledge. Universities must co-exist with a number of other knowledge-producing organisations. These include management consultancies, think-tanks, research-based units, universities - which business is setting up itself; a whole cluster of knowledge-producing agencies will exist alongside universities. Universities, for better or for worse, no longer have the monopoly on knowledge production, which they used to do; therefore, in education we must learn to network again between knowledge-producing organisations. One of the things we’re trying to do in the LSE, for example, is to create a knowledge park. A knowledge park wouldn't just be a science park, it would be a series of physical and social connections between diverse knowledge producers. We want to surround the LSE in a dialogic way with other knowledge-producing groups, such as management consultancies, think-tanks and so forth, so as to have a dialogue between them.

As universities start to relate to business and government in a more mobile environment, you will also find that you need a more dialogical relationship. If you consider the funding of university research, at one time it was acceptable for a business to offer you money to do the research. You'd do that research, you would come back, report the result and the business or the government agency would utilise it. That is no longer any good because the pace of scientific and technological innovation and the pace of social change is so strong that you can’t wait around. Neither a government agency nor a business can wait around 2 or 3 years while researchers come up with their conclusions. Therefore you must have a much more mutual learning experience between university education and other forms of knowledge production. So that when we design research projects at the LSE now, we design them as mutual learning processes, not as a system where the university has the basic knowledge which it simply transmits to the other. You need to have a dialogic process.

Fourthly, universities will have a crucial role to play in the recapturing of public space. We’re in the middle of a period of dramatic political change, and we’re trying to find a new model for a good society. We know and anyone in what was Eastern Europe knows that a good society is not one dominated by the state. We also have to be very sure that a good society is not one dominated by business and the markets either. A good society is not one where commercialisation, inequality, and insecurity - which tend to come along with the expansion of markets - are dominant. A good society is one which structures public space, which has an arena of public space and essentially argues that citizenship is not the same as being a consumer. Political freedom and political citizenship are not the same as the freedom to roam the aisles of the supermarket.

Universities have a key role to play in recovering public space. One of the most fundamental things we have to do in politics is to sustain a public sphere which is identified neither with the state nor with the market, but which has its own indigenous processes of citizenship and public discussion. I don’t think that this would be possible without the role of universities, but this role, today, has to be cosmopolitan and not national. I think one of the great successes of the EU in terms of citizenship is the success of the Erasmus program and other similar programs, which allow students to study in different countries, to learn different languages and to master different cultures. The Erasmus program, I think, has been very successful in creating a cosmopolitan generation in Europe, which will be crucial to Europe’s future success.

Fifthly, we know that education interacts with deprivation, with exclusion and with the yawning divisions, which we now see across the world. Can higher education be used as a medium for overcoming these divisions? Can the transformation of education allow us to at least help to deal with the enormous divisions between the poor and the rich in the contemporary world? What we know is that it would be very difficult to do this through traditional universities. We did a calculation at the LSE about the amount of investment that would be needed to produce the same kind of level of higher education in mainland China as exists in the United States. It would take some 2% of GDP over a 15% period even with a 10% growth rate. A completely impossible scenario.

Therefore you have to look at the role of new technologies, especially wireless technologies, where you don’t need to be wired to a computer. All of us in more-developed countries have an obligation to develop global-network universities for the benefit of those in poorer countries. There is a feasibility to this. It is a possible scenario for avoiding not just the famous digital divide, but the divide between those who have access to higher education and those who don't. I would enter a caveat on that. You cannot expect education to bear the burden of class divisions. Education will often reflect those divisions. We see from the role of universities in Africa, for example, that universities are often beleaguered, they are not able to the job on their own in a society, which is divided. Therefore you always come to back to the role of politics, to the need politically to address the issue of global inequality.

In conclusion, I should remind everyone here that this is not the first age of globalisation. As I believe was discussed in the conference last year, this is the second age of globalisation. The first age of globalisation was the late 19th century, in which there was a great deal of trade in commodities, in currencies, a great deal of migration across the world. At that time people believed that they could create a global cosmopolitan community and many people wrote of a future without war. Well, we know that the 20th century was a century of war. More than 200 million people died in war in the 20th century. This is the second age of globalisation. It is much more intense than the first age of globalisation. It is not riven with the same political divisions as the first age. We therefore have an obligation to try again. When the first age of globalisation collapsed that was the age that produced division and war. The great struggle for us will be against cosmopolitanism on the one and fundamentalism on the other. Fundamentalism means not just religious fundamentalism, but a refusal to listen. I would define fundamentalism as a refusal of dialogue. An insistence, whether it is ethnic, nationalist or religious fundamentalism, that only one way of life is right and proper and everyone else should get out of the way. We cannot create a decent world that way. Education can make a contribution to creating a global cosmopolitan community and let’s make it count in this generation. Let’s try and make the 21st century achieve the goals that we failed to achieve in the previous century.


DISCUSSION

Josef Jařab
I believe we are not surprised we have heard from Prof. Giddens not only a very, very deep analysis - in a short time - of what globalisation in education represents, but even a statement at the end that addresses us as citizens and politicians.
Let me now call on the first panellist, Professor Peter Scott, Vice-Chancellor of Kingston University and Director of the Centre for Policy Studies in Education. We met years ago as part of a trans-Atlantic dialogue, when, after the changes in Eastern Europe, East-European, West-European and American administrators of universities tried to establish the first contacts and exchange the first experiences they had.

Peter Scott
First I must say what a great privilege it is to take part in this conference. I’ve been asked to respond to Prof. Giddens’ excellent keynote address, so excellent, in fact that it leaves me little to respond to. I agree with almost everything he said. But it is my responsibility to continue the exploration of this morning’s theme: ‘The role of education and science in the process of world globalisation - opportunities and threats.’ I realise it’s rather discourteous to change the tile of your assignment. After all, we are always warning students to answer the examination question that has been asked, not the one they have been expecting to have to answer. But I hope you will forgive me if I add one, or rather, two letters to the title of this morning’s session: ‘processes of globalisation’ - in the plural - not ‘process’ in the singular; because this is the first of two points I’d like to emphasise in my brief intervention, and it’s a point already emphasised by Tony Giddens, namely, that globalisation is not a single movement, or even a particularly coherent set of trends, but rather a set of fractured and often contradictory phenomena. And my second point flows, I hope, naturally from the first point: it is that the role of education and science in globalisation is necessarily problematical and uncertain. At times they are its most insistent promoters: the source of the values and certainly of many of the technologies on which globalisation feeds. But at other times they are on opposite sides.

Let me briefly then develop both of those points in turn. First the fractures and contradictions of globalisation. Globalisation is not the same as internationalisation; it is agnostic to, or perhaps even hostile to the existence of nation states, around which the world is still largely organised. It is a restless, turbulent force, most apparent in economic affairs, but also in the mass media and culture, each of which apparently transcend national frontiers. Unlike internationalisation it also operates at the most local, the most individual and even the most intimate levels. So globalisation is not a kind of higher form, or even more intense form of internationalisation, it is different. And I think that has important consequences for the role education and science can play.

Globalisation is not the same as Americanisation either, despite, of course, the growing domination of English as a world language, form which we, the English accidentally benefit, or perhaps are accidentally disadvantaged in linguistic terms. Nor despite America’s domination of high technology, and despite the spread of what is sometimes described as ‘Coca-Cola Culture’ around the world. In the United States, as I’m sure American colleagues will confirm, globalisation is often perceived in terms of 3rd-World sweat-shops and so as a threat to American jobs. Certainly this is a major issue on American campuses today.

More speculatively, perhaps, globalisation may also be perceived as a threat to community and family values in America. The United States, I think we should always remember, is not only, in a sense, the most permissive, but also the most conservative developed society in the world. Globalisation may even be perceived, despite the action of American politics, as a corrupter of a kind of homely Jacksonian political values. And globalisation is not the same, as Professor Giddens also emphasised, as the triumph of free-market capitalism, as the liberalisation of economic structures, despite all the loose talk, perhaps a decade ago, of the end of history. Also part of globalization, is the world-wide resistance to this kind of trends, whether it is positively expressed in terms of principled opposition to the destruction of the environment, or perhaps more violently expressed as in the streets of this city and the streets of many a city in the past two years. I'm almost tempted to claim that the spread of religious fundamentalism, although here I would differ from Professor Giddens, is also an aspect of globalisation; it is also powered by global forces. Many of the same forces power that, as well as the cosmopolitan culture, which he described. My first point is very simple, but of course you may not accept it. Globalisation is a deeply-fractured phenomenon, not only sharply contested, but also full of its own contradictions. For example, as I have just said, religious fundamentalists exploit the most advanced technology in communication in order to resist the values and practices, which we feel are essentially associated with and have developed the processes of technology under the general banner of progress or cosmopolitanism perhaps. The old arguments about modernity and modernisation - can we have the latter without the former? - I think are writ large within the globalisation debate. Or perhaps to take a less controversial example and one that brings me closer to the role of education: what are we to make of what scientists see as the propagation of anti-scientific values through the mass media? The mass media using their well-honed persuasive skills, which again are an aspect of globalisation. Which side is globalisation on in that particular debate?

I would now like to turn to my second point, which was that the link between education and science on the one hand, and globalisation on the other, are much more problematical than they may appear at first. I think it's all too easy to assume that in a knowledge society the university - and I am going to concentrate largely on the role of the university as it's what I know best - to assume that the university as a - or perhaps - the leading knowledge institution, is bound to go from strength to strength. It is also too easy to assume that the university as, at least in its rhetoric, an international institution and science, or science as a universal enterprise, is bound to thrive under conditions of globalisation and that together as liberal, critical endeavours, they are certain to triumph in the new age of high technology and world cultures. As you may have gathered from what I said earlier, I am not so sure that that is going to be true and I am sure that we must critically reflect upon what I believe are rather lazy and complacent assumptions about the triumphal role of education and science in the process of globalisation, or as I would prefer, in the processes of globalisation. There in fact may be as many risks as there are opportunities.

I have four basic reasons for saying this: Firstly, as I have already said, there are so many strands within globalisation, which represent serious challenges to education and science, as they have been traditionally conceived. For example, the techniques of instant communication, which are often seen as being at the heart of the processes of globalisation, and which of course universities and other scientific institutions have been instrumental in creating and refining, are being used to convey values and meanings very different to those conventionally associated with education and science.

Second, universities, for all their internationalist rhetoric, are national institutions created to serve national purposes. They were founded originally to serve the domestic purposes of emperors, kings and princes. They were expanded to fill the state and corporate bureaucracies of the modern state and the expert society that developed in the late 19th and 20th centuries. They were most recently expanded to satisfy democratic demands for wider participation in higher education. If we look abroad, former colonial powers established universities to educate local elites to support the imperial project. Settler societies promoted universities to reinforce, to underline, their claims of incipient nationhood and so on. Science, too was intimately linked to the expression of national power. It is probably no coincidence that the golden age of post-war science coincided with the heights of the cold war. Today national rivalry may have been transposed into the scramble for economic advantage, but globalisation - I think we have to accept - may be an entirely new game with new rules.

Third, universities and all traditional educational and scientific institutions are challenged by rival institutions. Not, of course, subordinated institutions, arranged in tidy and regular hierarchies of function and esteem, but new kinds of institutions of corporate and virtual universities, as have already been mentioned, on-line learning systems, which are hardly institutions at all, the spread of the infotainment industry. The universities are also being challenged by new conceptions of lifelong learning, as Professor Giddens said, no longer neatly segmented in chronological and regular terms, and also of the idea of competence, which no longer needs to be calibrated neatly in terms of academic credentials. Maybe traditional institutions of all kinds, including universities, may be by-passed, and we should examine the impact of globalisation on the solidity of institutions, not simply the Encyclopaedia Britannica, but real institutions.

My fourth and last point is that of course very important changes, as Professor Giddens emphasised, are taking place in the way knowledge is produced. These accompany the processes of globalisation and are intimately related to it. These changes have been variously described in terms of the contextualisation or the wider distribution of knowledge production and of the emergence of knowledge, which is not simply scientifically valid, but also socially robust. I don't have time, of course, to defend those various accounts this morning, but arguably I think they compromise the status of specialised knowledge-producing institutions like universities and scientific laboratories. At this point I think I must stop, because I have probably overrun my time. Please forgive me for raising such important issues in such a shorthand and rather crude way. I will finish simply by reiterating my two main points.

First, globalisation is not a single movement, but a deeply-fractured phenomenon and second the role of education and science in globalisation is therefore necessarily problematical. Finally, what are the implications of my argument? First, that universities, as research institutions, have a special responsibility to define and refine what we mean by globalisation. The problem is, as Professor Giddens said, that we often mean too much by globalisation rather than too little. Of course they cannot take on that responsibility by themselves. They must share that crucial research function with governments and public and private associations of all kinds. The communities that are driving or being driven by globalisation all have a say in its definition.

Second, that universities as the leading institutions in the educational system also have a special responsibility to encourage their students and also indirectly pupils in schools to engage the cultural dimensions and perhaps the ethical and moral dimensions of globalisation. So as not to see the process solely in instrumental terms, as an opportunity for the best and brightest of their graduates to become a new global elite. That is an inadequate moral response.

Third, and finally, and perhaps most controversially, that states, the governments have a responsibility to ensure the autonomy of the university, as a key institution in ‘re-capturing public space’, in Professor Giddens’ phrase this seems almost the most important responsibility of the university at the start of the 21st century. Governments have a responsibility to see universities in that role. To see universities as public-service and not necessarily as public-sector institutions and not see universities as, in a sense, suitable objects for the further liberalisation of economic processes. Thank you.

Josef Jařab
We have heard two British insights - with, of course, a very strong cosmopolitan and international emphasis, and an awareness of citizenship. I would now move on to the next speaker, Professor Josep Bricall, who is the former President of the Association of European Universities. He, himself was a key actor in the reform of the Spanish education program of the European Union.

Josep Bricall
I think it is very difficult to disagree with what Professor Giddens said, for several reasons. He knows how universities function in a practical way, and as a sociologist he has university education as one of his main subjects.

I shall refer to three aspects of education, particularly higher education and globalisation. My first aspect will be the new phenomena that have changed university life in the past twenty years. The second point is the economic aspect of the globalisation process. I refer to this economic aspect, because I am an economist and more importantly because students go to universities with vocational aims. My third point will be some remarks and suggestions about to reconcile the tradition of the humanist university with the realities of our days. Ten minutes won't be enough, but I will try to sum up my views.

First point: the changes in the universities in the last twenty years. I believe we have to underline four particular phenomena. The first is the change referred to by Professor Giddens, namely, the emergence of a new class of students. The second is the technological changes. The third is the new kind of jobs available and finally, the diversification of higher education in order to cope with all of these factors. The first point - the emergence of a new class of students. According to a recent publication of the OECD, three new kinds of student can be distinguished. Young adults, second-chancers and second-biters. The first category, young adults, are students in their late twenties above the traditional university age. The second-chancers are students entering into tertiary education in mature adulthood, having missed out during the normal period when they were younger. The second-biters are people coming back for more tertiary education, therefore lifelong learning as mentioned in your speech.

But one remark has to be made: according to the OECD this increase in second-chancers and second-biters demonstrates a growing involvement of higher education in ordinary life. But this removal of the elite society does not mean a fair society. The second phenomenon refers to technological changes. The major productivity of humans is information-processing for purposes of process control. During the 1980s, a new wave of technological progress began. The technical changes of information and communication introduced into the economy can be applied to education and research. At work human activity is less devoted to physical labour. Moreover in traditional control and organisational activities, people have been partly substituted by machines, giving space to individuals for creativity, change and innovation. On the other hand, I have to underline again that the techniques of information and communication can be applied to the service sector, and of course information is a service in terms of economic activity.

The third point, and in my opinion the third important change of the last years in society and universities, concerns the wider range of jobs requiring higher training and education. Most of the skills acquired in universities in vocational studies led to the exercise of liberal professions in the past: lawyers, physicians and so on, or activities where professional skills were the only requirement. However, most of the students’ long-term demands are for education and training for jobs in business organising a normal schedule of business management, using tools and equipment and selling their commodities in competitive markets.
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The last point is the diversification of higher education institutions. It seems to me that the process of modifying the traditional system of higher education displays a double trend. On the one hand, we see a tendency to diversification of academic life and academic institutions and among them. On the other hand, there is a clear tendency to erase boundaries to satisfy a certain yearning to unify such variety. So different institutions then converge on similar curricula. That is an important point in my view.

The second part of my speech will be devoted to considering some aspects of the globalisation process. Naturally, I agree with Professors Giddens and Scott that the globalisation process entails different aspects. But I would like to refer to the economic aspect. As I have mentioned, students go to university in search of a professional qualification. I think that the economic process has enhanced professional studies and as a result the influence of traditional liberal arts has declined in classical universities. In a certain sense, these trends in higher education represent the other side of the economic revolution. Often this evolution is known as a globalisation process. Nevertheless, as Professor Giddens said, globalisation is a reality for societies now.

In the eighteenth century, Adam Smith explained the link between a larger markets, division of labour and increasing returns to scale. The larger markets mean globalisation. I think that the new look of the globalisation process in recent times is the fragmentation of the production process. The fragmented process works through the localisation of activities in different territories and regions. Wherever this fragmentation spreads, globalisation displays new faces. Let me outline some of them.

First, the recent techniques of information and technology allow different ways of operating. The centralisation and decentralisation of activities and decisions are mixed according to the technical requirements, the transport costs, the control of markets and so on. A new and stronger process of merging has appeared.

Secondly, more important than innovation is the application of new techniques in order to increase productivity. Therefore, transfer of technology and ‘learning by doing’ can widen the area of developed countries. Thirdly, the main factor to attract capital is the training and education of the population, i.e. human resources. This fact opens the door to some people in developing countries, but closes the same door to other territories and other people in the developed world.

Fourthly, the dissemination of the production process requires huge flows of funds for finance purposes. In this international financial market it is not easy to distinguish between speculative funds and the production needs of countries. Over the last twenty years, in spite of the augmented capacity of production of the wealthiest economies, several crises have arisen. Market fundamentalism has sacrificed the solution of economic social problems to fear of speculation, in order to gain the trust of the funds suppliers.

My last point will be how exactly to react to this process from the point of view of universities. I would like to point out two consequences of the whole globalisation process in universities. The first consequence has been commented on by Professor Scott: the fact that governments have in the past used universities as a tool for training of bureaucracies, especially the establishment within national borders. I believe that things are changing very rapidly. Governments still jealously guard higher-education policy in their hands. In spite of that, through the autonomy of universities, through networking, through the transfer of knowledge from one university to another, a new process is beginning. It is a process whereby the universities of the present time are preparing their students, in a more implicit way, to be members of a global Establishment of the world.

This is something that is happening at great speed in different countries. The governments are acting within certain parameters, but in reality things are going another way. That is my first point. The second consequence is that globalisation has imposed a special bias on the higher education system. This is the global responsibility of universities referred to by President Havel. There is a humanist tradition in universities, which when it was accepted in the Renaissance, was a difficult process. It did not simply reaffirm the values of the ancient cultures, it also set out new approaches to human problems. In my view it was a bottom-top approach replacing a top-down vision. So I think it is a special responsibility of the university to concern itself with human problems. The human problems in the globalisation process, however, are quite different. I would suggest some areas where it is possible to do something. In my view, it is possible to organise seminars between colleges and universities where, on a multi-disciplinary basis, scientists from different fields, concerned at the limits of their knowledge, could discuss the exact definition of theories and human problems and be ready to verify the validity of reasoning and listen to each other, since listening to the other is how to avoid fundamentalism.

My second suggestion - the broad flexibility offered to students on the learning path - gives the opportunity to create a new atmosphere where non-vocational options are available which widen the horizons of the learner. My third suggestion is that there be a network of universities, laboratories and other institutions of research specifically linked to productive activities of society. I think universities could make an active commitment to such values as equality, opportunity and solidarity in order to offset the trend to linking universities to the private, business sector. One particular case could be to encourage a solidarity movement of co-operation with other universities in less developed regions, not only in other countries, but even in the same country.

The fourth point, pertains to consumption. The industrial societies have increased leisure time and this trend is likely to continue. Consumption behaviour has increased the stimulation sources, but not the content of the stimulation. Educational institutions have the opportunity to provide the criteria to choose the consumption goods in order to satisfy intellectual and cultural needs in a more positive way.

Josef Jařab
Thank you very much Professor Bricall. So that we may hear more of the European universities' view I would like to call on Dr. Andris Barblan, who is currently the Secretary-General of the Association of European Universities, a historian and political scientist. He has also worked for the World Council of Churches and the European Centre for Culture. We know Andris Barblan in Eastern and Central Europe as someone who has helped to integrate the universities of the region into the European network.

Andris Barblan
Well, I don't really know how to begin, because I feel that most things have already been said. I hear that we have problems with fragmentation, with fractures, with diversification, with specialisation, with localisation, so we see a kind of world, which is divided into all kinds of pieces. This leaves us wondering where the university - although we should speak of all kinds of education - fits in and how it can give a sense of unity to the development.

I would like to remind members that education comes from educere, meaning to lead out. So education is a process of leading someone out from one space to another space. It is a maturity process, a growing process. It means that you have one place you come from and you go to another place. It means that you have a sense of direction. It means that there is an authority somewhere to lead the process. I remind you that within the word education, educere is the word dux, the leader, which can mean the duce in Italy, in fascist times, or it can mean the Venetian doge or the one in Genoa, which come from the same word. Education is about change, maturity and growth. In the context of these spaces of how does one go from one to the other, I have a feeling today that most of the institutions, which were mediating that process are posing the question. There used to be a system of power and it still exists to a degree today, where power was linked to communication - but communication and distance. The more distant you were, the more powerful you were. The palaces we are sitting in are examples of that kind of link between people in power and people supposed to obey, people who had to go one way, people who had to be taken from one place to another.

Rather funnily if you think who we are here, representing universities and institutions supposed to mediate, governments and other institutions supposed to mediate; media and other organisations who by definition are supposed to mediate; we are in a way dinosaurs of the new society. We are the dinosaurs of the 21st century. In many places with the new technologies, the type of authority that we represent is no longer listened to. It's no longer needed and many people still go straight to authority, to the sources of knowledge through the Internet. They don't worry if this is the truth or not. So we are moving from a society of arguments with a certain authority to a society made of opinions, where people exchange opinions. This is a very fluctuating world. What can be done to try to move away or to give an axis to this fluctuating world? Well, I could go on about these sort of elements for quite a while, but let's move on to something which will show the link between what I have just said.

In six months from now, perhaps in this same room, President Havel will host another meeting. A meeting of the ministers of education of 29 or 30 European countries. These education ministers will meet in Prague to take stock of the measures decided by governments or by civil society, to change this European, multi-faceted, fragmented space of higher education into an open space of higher education. Ministers last year signed a declaration in Bologna, stating that by 2010 they would like Europe to be an open space of education. How can we achieve that? Here, I will move to some approaches. I think that the Bologna declaration hits a few important points. The declaration states four things which must be done. We must make European education readable, so that citizens know what is on offer. These things must be made comparable. Thirdly they must be made compatible and finally transparent. Readability, comparability, compatibility and finally transparency. This, in my view, is the new quadrivium.

We know that in the old mediaeval university when you were doing your arts and letters you had to go through the seven liberal arts. The trivium and the quadrivium. In a way the quadrivium was there to help people to situate themselves. This is what the Bologna declaration is saying for systems of higher education, but I am saying that in the education process this is also true for the people as they are. What we as educators should give to people is the capacity to read the world. Once they have read the world they must be given the capacity to compare what they have been learning. Then they must have the capacity to make things compatible, so that they can engage in the world. If they have transparency then they will have enough trust to commit themselves to the world. These are four levels of education which will help people not to be orgueuilleux as President Havel mentioned, but to be humble in face of science and technology and that as people they need an axis to be able to ride the very turbulent waters that we are on. This is the axis of humanity that we need.

I will stop here. I’ve tried to indicate that in terms of sociology we have to move from information to convergence, to coherence to cohesion. What we need at the end of the day is a 21st century that is cohesive.

Josef Jařab
Thank you very much Dr. Barblan for reminding us of the Bologna Magna Carta and the very practical steps being taken in Europe, including this country for solving some of the problems of education on the international scene. I would now ask Madame Hanna Suchocka former Prime Minister of Poland and former Minister of Justice and Attorney General of the Polish Republic, for a few remarks on the education experience in her country and in our countries.

Hanna Suchocka
I would like to be very brief and not present another speech, because there is no time for this.

I would like only to remind us of a few things that are maybe very obvious, but sometimes aren't present in such a discussion. I think it's worthwhile to remember that there are still various divisions in Europe and the world. I am representing one of the parts of the world, the former Soviet Europe. I think that the difference can still be seen and that some things that are very obvious for Western European people are not so obvious for us. I think that we have a longer journey before us than you have to find ourselves in a globalised world. When I observe our society I see that globalisation arouses more fear than hope. I think that is due to a lack of knowledge of what globalisation actually means. You were better able to define globalisation; we have heard a very nice definition of globalisation versus Americanisation versus fundamentalism versus even internationalism.

For us the first step to globalisation is membership in the European Union. For us, in this part of Europe. being in the EU is a kind of globalisation, whereas for Western people it is normal life. We have to educate our people on how to live in a united Europe and that is the first step. We have been trying to do it for ten years and we have yet to reach our goal of being in the EU. During the forty years in the Soviet system we lived as a very closed society. Suddenly, for the past ten years, we have had to learn how to live in an open society. An open society for many means a lack of values. When there is a lack of values or the new values are not clearly identified and defined, it can lead people to look for old values such as nationalism, the nation state and national values. As Professor Scott said, we were educated in these kind of values. For us Poles especially, there was no nation state in the 19th century. We now try to preserve our nationality, our Polish values. We have to put our values on the international front, into the global world.

The role of education in such a situation is very important. I think the new role of the university is also to redefine values for the 21st century. Sometimes we don't like to speak of values in this a sense, because we don't regard it as modern. However, in the 21st century we should redefine what exact values we need. Our young people, especially, don't recognise traditional values and feel completely lost. They do not have a line linking them with the old and new world. I think that the Internet could pose a danger for them instead of a hope. The role of the university is to not only transmit knowledge, but also to look for better presentation of what is distributed and discussed at various levels. However, we must address the grass roots, the primary and secondary education as people at this level are completely unprepared for living in an open society. The first steps have been taken, but these are only the first steps and we must go deeper and further to not only transmit knowledge to them, but as you said, to give them the capacity to read the world and to be able to read the old world and the new world that stands before us.

Josef Jařab
I would like to give the floor to Professor Fritjof Capra, physicist and assistant theorist, Director of the Berkeley-based Centre for Ecoliteracy to open the discussion.

Fritjof Capra
It is indeed a pleasure to be back and to continue to participate in the discussions at Forum 2000. I believe that in order to prepare young generations for the challenges of the future, education in the age of globalisation should be about globalisation. As we have heard today, globalisation has many facets. However, when we worry about globalisation, we worry first and foremost about the new global economy. During the last two decades of the twentieth century, the information technology revolution gave rise to a new type of global capitalism, which is structured around flows of information, power and wealth in global financial networks. Manuel Castells, Professor of Sociology at Berkeley has described this new network economy in great detail. His analysis should be part of our future economics and business curriculum.

For the first time in history the whole world is organised around a largely common set of economic rules. Strictly speaking, this ‘global market’ is not a market at all, but a giant automaton: a network of machines, programmed according to a single value - money making for the sake of making money, at the exclusion of all other values. Since the new economy is shaped very much by machines, it is not surprising that the resulting cultural, social and economic environment is not life-enhancing but life-threatening and life-degrading. Young people need to know that the rise of a new global capitalism is intertwined with rising social inequality, polarisation and social exclusion. It has increased global migration, created a global criminal economy that profoundly affects national and international economies and politics; it has threatened and destroyed eco-systems and local communities around the world. By the relentless pursuit of a misguided bio-technology it has invaded the sanctity of life by attempting to turn life’s diversities into monocultures, ecology into engineering and life itself into a commodity.

We owe it to our students to be honest about these consequences when we teach them about information technology and social science. There is an emerging consensus that global capitalism needs to be regulated and constrained. Its financial flows need to be organised according to a different set of values and beliefs. This was expressed repeatedly in our previous Forum 2000 discussions, and similar discussions need to take place in our educational institutions. What are the new values that we need in order to reshape globalisation?

At our last meeting a year ago, President Havel urged us to think about the ethical dimension of globalisation. Ethics refers to a standard of human conduct that flows from a sense of belonging. When we belong to a community we behave accordingly and this is when we behave ethically. Within the context of globalisation, I can think of two communities that we all belong to. We all are members of humanity and as such our behaviour should reflect the values of human rights, justice and dignity. These issues have been addressed at Forum 2000 by speakers who are eminently more qualified than I to address them. I shall therefore turn to the other community we all belong to.

We are all members of the Earth household, which is the Greek root of the word ecology. As such we should behave like the other members of the household: the plants, animals and micro-organisms that form the vast network of relationships that we call the web of life. This web of life is a global network that has unfolded, evolved and diversified for the last 3 billion years without ever being broken. The most outstanding characteristic of the Earth household is its inherent ability to sustain life. As members of this community it behoves us to behave in such a way so as not to interfere with nature’s ability to sustain life. This is the essential meaning of ecological sustainability. What is sustained in a sustainable community is not economic growth or development, but the entire web of life on which our long-term survival depends. In other words, a sustainable community is designed in such a way that its ways of life, businesses, economy, physical structures and technologies do not interfere with nature’s inherent ability to sustain life. The first step in this endeavour must be to become ‘ecologically literate’ that is to understand the principles of organisation that ecosystems have developed to sustain the web of life.

In order to do so we need to think systemically. As President Havel put it so eloquently last night, education is the ability to perceive the concealed connections between phenomena. In the next century, ecological literacy will be a critical skill for politicians, business leaders and professionals in all spheres. More than that it will be critical for the survival of humanity as a whole and therefore will be the most important part of education at all levels, from schools to college and universities, to the continuing education and training of professionals.

In my contribution to the first Forum 2000 in 1997, I outlined the conceptual framework, instructional strategies and leadership characteristics required by the fostering of ecological literacy in primary and secondary education. This is what my colleagues and I are developing at the centre for ecoliteracy in California and there are other organisations that do similar work in higher education.

The next step will be to apply our ecological knowledge to the fundamental redesign of our technologies and social institutions so as to bridge the gap between human design and the ecologically-sustainable systems of nature. Fortunately, ecologically-oriented design practices have risen dramatically over the past few years and all of them are now well documented, but these new ideas and design practices have not yet reached the chemistry, engineering and material science departments of our universities. I have tried very briefly to summarise what I mean about teaching about globalisation, about the nature of the global economy, its economic, social and ecological impacts and about the alternative frameworks of eco-literacy and eco-design. This knowledge is in fact being taught today, but it is taught largely outside our leading academic institutions, business organisations and government agencies. It is being transmitted and continually refined by coalitions of grass roots organisations in informal teach-ins and in new institutions of learning that function as networks rather than hierarchies in accordance with the emergence of networking as a new form of social organisation, as Professor Giddens also emphasised.

Schumacher College in England is an example of these new institutions of learning. It is an international centre for ecological studies with philosophical and spiritual roots in deep ecology, where students of the world gather to learn, live and work together while being taught by an international faculty. I believe that one of the most important tasks of governments, business organisations and foundations is to strengthen these new institutions of learning by raising their visibility through official accreditation and by funding them from the small percentage of the vast profits that have been made in the new global economy. These institutions will be at the centre of the new civil society, which many observers of globalisation are calling for.

The very ideas and values that they teach will need to become part of the principles of organisation of the financial flows of the global economy. Because of the great versatility and accuracy of the new information and communication technologies, effective regulation of global capitalism according to humanistic and ecological principles is technically feasible today. The challenge of education in the 21st century is to change the value system of the global economy to make it compatible with human dignity and ecological sustainability.

Josef Jařab
If the task is to change the value system, it is a task for present society and even more so for future generations. Last but not least, we have the student representative at the end of our panel. Some might regard young people as the clientele of the educational system, but I prefer to view them as partners.

Colm O’Cinneide
Thanks to the immense generosity of the Nippon foundation and the Forum 2000 foundation, last June 60-70 students from all across the globe met here in this wonderful arena to debate about globalisation. It was an unforgettable experience for us all and it was also in many ways an example of the opportunities that globalisation opens up. Young people have been traditionally identified as the primary beneficiaries of globalisation, in terms of mobility, communication; interconnectedness - as mentioned by Professor Giddens - in terms of certain cultures, of new gender rights, new rights all across certain spheres.

What was striking, in the light of this traditional perception of young people as positive participants in the globalisation process, was the disquiet that runs through all of the contributions to the discussions this year. Contributor after contributor identified feelings of alienation and exclusion from so many of the global and local trends. In particular there was an emphasis on the massive exclusion of millions globally from the opportunities that have been opened up by globalisation. As a Law graduate and therefore naturally over-obsessed by detail, when I hear about how the Internet will transform the world and education, I would always like to add a footnote to that: - ‘subject to the socio-economic and gender realities’. This has to be borne in mind right down the line, in the face of massive exclusion globally.

The Students’ Forum were at pains to emphasise that education is more than what goes on in formal university establishments, especially in Western Europe and North America. Education, as Professor Capra has made clear, consists of many facets: you have the formal sector - universities, primary schools, secondary schools. You also, of course, have the informal sector. Young people, like anyone, learn through participation, in NGO networks, in civil society, in their families and through the Internet. There are so many alternative networks and public and private spheres where education goes on and it is important in these discussions that we don’t limit ourselves to a narrow view of what education does.

In considering this, the Students’ Forum was at pains to try to identify the values that shape education our consensus was that education should be more than just a tool to produce good producers and good consumers in a global market-place economy. The values that should underlie education should focus on the development of your self-identity, as a morally-autonomous individual. It should enable the educated to engage with creativity, to participate in society, in all these different private and public spheres I have mentioned. Education should also be, in the words of Nelson Mandela, a tool of liberation. Education should enable those educated to think critically about society, to engage in dialogue with other communities, people of other faiths and from other societies. It should enable them to take part in a multicultural exchange to criticise, if necessary, existing beliefs if necessary and to enter into a dialogue. It seemed to the Students’ Forum that globalisation should assist this; globalisation should be a massive opportunity for trying to implement these values.
Unfortunately we’re not seeing that happen to the degree it should. In particular, there is still massive restricted access to education due to socio-economic factors and due to gender factors. Even in Western Europe, even in North America - ‘privileged’ parts of the globe - we are seeing education increasingly reduced to serve a mass-production process, turning out graduates who haven’t had the time to develop themselves as participants, to develop themselves in terms of a network.
We suggest that there has been a failure: a failure in terms of policy, a failure in terms of conceptualisation, to seize the opportunities opened up by globalisation. The same failures are also occurring in the field of science. Professor Capra pointed out that the application of scientific knowledge is acting as a mechanism to widen global inequality.

We stand at the beginning of a new industrial revolution in two spheres in particular: information technology and biotechnology. I think that in many ways we are just as unprepared for this revolution as we were for the original industrial revolution at the beginning of the 19th century. As a young person, I am expected to talk incessantly about information technology, so for a change I will focus on biotechnology. It seems that the discussion is focused on science, in terms of Internet and information technology. We should also be aware that in the developed world there have been massive breakthroughs in biotechnology, raising the possible concern that in the privileged parts of the world single-cell genetic disorders will be eliminated within 50 years and there will be massively-extended life spans. None of this will be available to a large part of the globe. There will be an even greater divide than now even in terms of basic human needs. We feel that this is not being confronted.

Science can operate - very frequently - as a natural ideology. It is presented in the same way that the free market is presented: as an inevitable process that goes on divorced from any social and economic context. This leads to an accompanying ideology of determinism - genetic determinism at the moment -which is becoming increasingly in vogue. You see it in such works as Murray and Herrnstein’s ‘The Bell Curve’, but it’s also present in the works of many intellectually-respected contributors. We should reject this idea of determinism and we should educate to make it clear that science is an ongoing process. We should recognise that decisions are political and as engaged actors there are choices to be made of how to educate and how to educate for science, and use science to increase the values we have identified and reduce the inequality. Inertia is a choice, just as much as activity. This is the challenge facing this Forum, just as it faces the Students’ Forum and most of the globe.

The Students’ Forum identified certain tools which we felt could aid us - aid us in coping with globalisation and dealing with these inequalities. We identified participation, what Zigmund Bauman talked about as ‘anti-passivity’, training for participation in society at every level. That involved to such things as access to basic education, which is denied across substantial parts of the globe. We also identified training to engage in multi-culturalism, to engage in a dialogue with other faiths and cultures. We also identified training to engage in critical thinking, again as a morally autonomous being. We think it is training in these three spheres that will help us combat fundamentalism in any sphere that previous speakers talked about.

Prof. Capra, as a moderator of last year’s forum, stressed the need for new and developed types of literacy. Literacy - political literacy, eco-literacy, socio-economic literacy and cross-cultural literacy - is crucial and cannot be over-emphasised in a globalised world. I also feel we can transmit these values to how we cope with science. If we stress participation, if we recognise that the application of science involves decisions as to how that science is applied, that would require participation from throughout the globe that will be crucial to reducing inequality. We also have to recognise that science is an ongoing dialogue. Thomas Coombs’ ideas have been quoted, and have almost become a cliché. But the grain of truth in them is that science is a dialogue that uncovers incredibly valuable pictures of the world - but it's necessary in choosing to see how we use these pictures, to recognise the need for participation, for critical thinking, and to examine pre-suppositions.

In the 19th century, a common European and American assumption was that if you were poor it was because you were genetically stupid. This is the sort of uncritical pseudo-scientific thinking that needs to be constantly combated using the tools that the Students’ Forum identified. Other aspects of this are that educating for acceptance of multiculturalism is not enough if societies deny multiculturalism. Western Europe, to deal with the part of the world I come from, has to make some very serious choices as to whether it wants to exist as a multi-cultural society, or as an integrationist, assimilationist, one-colour society. These are important choices that cannot be divorced from decisions about how we go about educating for multi-culturalism. But it seems to me, and to the Students’ Forum, that to develop participation, to develop multi-culturalism and to develop dialogue, we need to educate, we need to keep educational establishments, civil-society networks, universities, etc., free of interference. We need to develop students’ and young persons’ participation, to develop a capacity for critical thought. The Students’ Forum identified these as key values and we feel that this is the challenge for us to consider at this forum.

Josef Jařab
Thank you Colm for giving us the message from the Students’ Forum and discussing the problems of education.

I would now like to give Professor Giddens a chance to make some comments on what has been said before I open the discussion.

Anthony Giddens
I would like to make some comments on the interesting speeches so far. I saw a person in Seattle with a placard that I found quite amusing, but also instructive, ‘Join the World-wide Protest against Globalisation!’. What this shows us is that the people on the streets in Seattle were part of globalising processes. They used the technologies of globalisation to assemble there. What occurred was globalisation from above meeting globalisation from below. Globalisation from below - the growth of NGOs, special interest groups, civil-society associations: there are thirty thousand such groups in the world now. Thirty years ago there were only a few hundred, so this as much part of globalisation as what is normally thought to be the core of globalisation.

The same goes for fundamentalism, which is a child of global electronic culture. The fundamentalists were the first to use global communications in the U.S. and elsewhere, and, as we know, fundamentalist groups have made extensive use of the Internet. Fundamentalism is a reaction to part of globalising processes. Interesting comments were made about the humility of science. There is another side to science - the aggressive Promethean ethos. I would like to suggest that our relationship with science and technology has shifted fundamentally in this generation. The reason for that is that science and technology enter our lives much more directly, completely and quickly than ever before. We can no longer wait for scientists to tell us the truth of the findings they claim. We are in a more open and public relationship with science than any previous generation.

In many matters such as ecological issues, mentioned by Prof. Capra, no one really knows what the extent of these phenomena are and scientists themselves disagree. You cannot leave science to the scientists. This is one of the great democratising features of late modernity that there must be continuing dialogue between the scientists, the public and politicians. It has to be brought into the very centre of democracy.

Thirdly, I would like to enter a mild caveat to what Madame Suchocka said. I would say the opposite: without globalisation there would be no Velvet Revolution, no 1989. If you look at the history of the Soviet Union, you can see that it was quite competitive in the old industrial economy. Its authoritarian system worked quite well in that old economy, in the same way that mass-manufacturing hierarchies worked well in the old economy. The Soviet Union was unable to cope with the new globalised electronic information-based economy. The system of authoritarian power it represented became dysfunctional. It was unable to cope with the hi-tech economy. Globalisation underlies the changes and shifts in world society. I would include the ending of apartheid in that, the frustrated dialogue in the Middle East and in Northern Ireland. There was a kind of global electronic dialogue around the world and none of these events would have happened without the others. This was really something new, because it would not have been possible before the 1970s.

Professor Capra put his finger on the key questions for us. On one hand, massive inequalities, not however, brought about by globalisation - it’s a complete myth to argue that even if you equate globalisation with free markets, that free markets lead to increased inequality. There is not a clear relationship. He also mentioned ecological issues. The fundamental question for us is how to reconcile those two. We only know of one way of overcoming poverty. That is economic development in which the poor participate. There is no way of dealing with poverty through redistribution. The only way is to shift from a market-based philosophy, where the poor do not participate, to one where government recovers a role. The active participation of the government, not the predominance of the state, is the only way to ensure that the poor participate. After the example of South-East Asia, we know it is possible to make massive inroads into global poverty, but it can’t be done without economic growth. However, is that compatible with the ecologically-degraded structure of the world’s ecosystems?

I believe it may be - for two reasons. Ecological modernisation now stresses that ecologically-sophisticated production is compatible with the generation of jobs and the creation of economic development. Second, you must have co-ordinated global action, which must be more effective than the Kyoto protocol. Can we achieve that? We don’t know. If we have a co-ordinated government action on a global scale and not the unfettered deregulation which leaves everything down to market forces. That is not the way to create a decent world.

Josef Jařab
The first comment in the discussion is from Mr. Singh.

Karan Singh
I want to make a couple of brief remarks. First of all the UNESCO report on education in the 21st century. I happened to be a member of the Jacques Delors commission. That came out with a report called ‘Learning the treasure within’. It deals in some depth with many of the problems that the educationists today have been mentioning, so I thought I would mention it in the unlikely event that some of the people round the table have not come across it.

I must now join issue with Prof. Giddens on a couple of points. Firstly, he said that fundamentalism is the child of globalisation. I feel that this is a gross over-simplification. In fact fundamentalisms of many kinds have been with us for many centuries and although they may be using the Internet, but to say that fundamentalism is the child of globalisation, with all due respect, is simply incorrect.

The second point that Professor Giddens pointed to as Director the LSE, that the only way of overcoming poverty is to increase growth. Fair enough, but there have to be limits to growth. This whole theory that you can go on exploiting the resources of the world for indefinite growth is what has brought the world to the present predicament. I would like to quote Mahatma Gandhi, ‘There is enough for all men’s need, but not enough for one man’s greed.’ Thank you.

Hazel Henderson
I would like to follow up on Mr. Giddens last remarks by citing a relevant government experiment in public education on science and technology policy, which took place in my country, the USA, from 1974-6. I’m talking about the US Office of Technology Assessment. I was in on the birth of that and served on its advisory council. It used communications and a network of academic scholars from all disciplines to assess the social and ecological impact of technology policy choices.

It produced hundreds of meticulous reports, which stand very well today and can be obtained from the US government printing office on CD ROM. This experiment educated the public immensely about issues that we are dealing with today. We did studies on biotechnology and its danger and on electronic bulls and bears long before we talked today about the global casino. However, the Republican majority in the US Congress shut down that institution in 1996. It was simply too much of a threat to the ideology that exists in the USA. In contrast there is a very successful global public education project going on, in which I have also participated: the Earth Charter. It is a grass-roots effort going on world-wide by NGOs to identify this moral minimum. So far it has been enormously successful. It was launched at The Hague in May as a new global phenomenon - a sort of pre-global legislative regulatory phenomenon.

Frederik Willem De Klerk
I really enjoyed the discussion this morning and I would like to say something and maybe Prof. Giddens would like to react. He contrasted a cosmopolitan culture with fundamentalism. I don’t have a problem with that, but he didn’t expand on what a cosmopolitan culture mean. If I want to link that up with what the student leader said when he linked the concept with multi-culturalism. I have a feeling that when we deal with globalisation or Europeanisation, somehow we have to do within the framework of realities. I think, for instance that the ‘melting-pot’ theory is also a fundamentalist approach. If I take a typical European, I think one must allow room for a Scotsman to be a Scotsman although he is also a citizen of the United Kingdom. There should also be room for that Scotsman to be a British subject and a European. That’s another part of the reality of his life. He also is a member of the global community. When facing the complexity of diversity the solution is not to kill the diversity, but to bring compatibility and harmonisation without destroying diversity.

Asma Jahangir
I just want to make a short comment. What we heard today was wonderful, but I think that we must especially congratulate our student leader. He gave us a hope that globalised values are there. He addressed the question of gender and the hundreds of millions that have not reached literacy level. I would very much like to go with the notion of diversity. To kill diversity is a uni-polarisation of the world and in our countries where we are multi-cultural, multi-religious, multi-linguistic it will not help. I would like to say that we heard Madame Suchocka’s view of globalisation. We have to take into account all of these perspectives: gender, developing countries and people who have different values, which may not have matured or so it may be perceived in the western world. However, values are there in every part of the world although they may be different from one’s own. What really needs to be globalised far more than anything else is the West itself.

Mariano Plotkin
It seems clear that we are a part of the global community. This is where I wonder what happens to those who are not a part of the global community. I come from Latin America, a part of the world where there are increasing numbers of children for whom Internet literacy is not even an issue, because they don’t have access not only to the Internet but even to a basic education. I want to emphasise that it is an increasing number of children who have been excluded from basic education but I guess that it is the same for other parts of the world.

My comment is that I was surprised that all the presentations were about higher education when this large part of humanity is being excluded from that.

Ivan Vejvoda
I am a late entrant to this conference. I am the Director of the Fund for an Open Society in Belgrade and also a political and social scientist. Globalisation is upon us and I think that one of the things to realise is that, as Premier Suchocka mentioned, there is a lot of fear and insecurity in most societies around the world, even in developed societies. These fears have to be allayed.

I agree that we must find a compromise between our various identities, whether it be our gender identity, our educational identity, or our national identity with the global cosmopolitanism of which we are a part. If people do not feel secure in their identities or they are pushed into a mono-identity, globalisation will be felt as a source of further insecurity, and those sentiments then breed the worst evils that mankind has put forward. I fortunately come from a liberated Serbia and Yugoslavia; we beat Milošević by the ballot box in a non-violent democratic manner. We defended that vote ten days later and we are now in day ten of liberty. However, I don’t want to dwell on what has been going on in my country.

I would like to address something Prof. Giddens called the ‘mutual learning process’. As many have stated, education takes place outside the institutions. My country has undergone a huge learning process about participation, about inclusiveness. It is the old Renaissance idea of vivere civile, a civic life. Until every individual, whether young or old, man or woman, realise that if they do not pitch in themselves, we will be living in an authoritarian regime.

I would like to say, that having lived in a society under sanctions, I think it is the worst possible policy for helping a country move from a closed to an open society. We have to learn from these experiences. When sanctions were introduced in May 1992 it included all academic relations whatsoever. Fortunately, there were colleagues that understood that this was very negative and invited some of us to conferences on an individual basis. Other colleagues of mine, especially in the natural sciences, were not so fortunate and were denied access to the network of global scientific communication.

Josef Jařab
Thank you Dr Vejvoda. It is very good to see you back here and especially your country, which has such great hopes and expectations shared by all of us. Alexander Leeser.

Alexander Leeser
I represent the International Philosophy Olympiad. Last year in Germany I was asked to be its President and will organise the 9th Philosophy Olympiad for high school students: ‘From Violence to Tolerance Towards Reconciliation, Peace and Global Democracy’, next year in Philadelphia.

As I have travelled the world talking about this, I’m not surprised to discover that it has garnered the support of an extraordinary array of individuals, because it does stress the fundamental issues that have been raised here, especially by the representative of the Students’ Forum. The UNESCO report stated the importance of philosophy for the promotion of democracy. I think it remarkable that this initiative developed in Eastern Europe in 1990 as a result of the realisation in those countries that they had radically different conceptions of their own histories and their mutually-shared histories as result of the isolation that had been imposed upon them by forces beyond their control. I would also like to mention the World Congress that will take place in conjunction with the Olympiad . We will also be a partner with the Earth-Traveller initiative and use that as the rubric for our discussions among the students. Furthermore we are partners of Dialogue among Civilisations.

I wanted to draw your attention to these initiatives. There are networks around the world to support this project, which hold their own national Olympiads. I think it is a worthwhile project that deserves the support of this gathering.

Martin Terefe
I just had a quick question to the educators here. I am a musician who has had the privilege to travel to many parts of the world. It seems to me that one of the main educators, especially in the Western world, is the media, entertainment and the ad agencies. That level of that education is increasingly sinking. So how do we educate these agencies and reclaim our journalists, artists, etc.?

Josef Jařab
Would anyone like to answer?

Anthony Giddens
I think that this question about the media is a crucial one, because it seems to me that the media have a double relationship to the events we’re describing. On the one hand, the spread of mass communication opens up new spaces for democracy. There is a structural connection between the emergence of a global information society and the spread of democratic institutions. There are three times as many democratic countries in the world as there were thirty years ago. It is not accidental.

On the other hand, the media closes down the very spaces it opens by trivialising, by insisting on a direct relationship with politicians, which circumvents parliament, and by the expansion of media monopolies across the world, whereby a few individuals are able to dominate media space. It is absolutely crucial to any kind of political advance that we fight back against that and we try to open up a more effective public space. Education can only play a partial role in that; you need direct political action to preserve public space.

I think we should find a role for public intellectuals. I don’t think their time is over. I think that people in universities should be prepared to speak out against the trivialisation of everyday political events and form a reactive force. We must fight back as the very forces that spread democracy are shrinking it. Intellectuals have a key role in that in my view.

Alena Švejdová
I would like to speak as an ordinary secondary-school teacher, as someone who deals with students and children every day. I think that there is an obvious difference between education and knowledge. Knowledge leads to ability and education leads us to wisdom, as President Havel mentioned today. Parents and children want us to give their children just knowledge, because they know that if they have the proper knowledge that they will have a good position in the world - they will get a good job. Sometimes as teachers we are judged by the results of entrance exams to universities or other exams. Secondary schools are judged sometimes by how many pupils get to university. So what we have to do is give knowledge.

Every day we have students and children in front of us and no one can imagine what problems they have. They can communicate with anyone overseas over the Internet, but they have many problems in communicating among themselves. They don’t understand the relationships between themselves and the class and worse still, they don’t understand themselves. This is the problem that the conference has forgotten is the role of the family. I believe that education starts in the family, because the family teaches us basic relationships. I think that if we don’t stress the role of the family in education then we will continue to have these problems.

Josef Jařab
We have an immediate reaction to this contribution from Dr. Alena Hromádková

Alena Hromádková
As a university teacher, I fully share this concern that young people are regarded solely as a labour force and the problem of moral personality formation is enormous. In this country for instance, the Minister of Education suggested the abolition of six- or eight-year grammar schools, which are an integral part of Central European culture - a cultural and political legacy.

It is something to do with the compromised term ‘elite’. However, if you were ill you would prefer to go to an ‘elite’ doctor rather than a standard one. So certain vocations need this professional approach to education and this is politically ignored and suppressed. I think we should talk more of the moral and spiritual dimension of education. I also fear the cliché ‘globalisation’ and can appreciate Mr De Klerk’s concern about protection of diversity, pluralism and the historical development of personalities and nations.

Fritjof Capra
I would like to comment about the media in regard to the opposition to economic globalisation. The mass media have portrayed this opposition as violent street protesters. In reality, the opposition comes from a world-wide network of NGOs and grass-roots movements and is very well organised, very effective and includes many scholars, lawyers and experts in sustainable agriculture, as well as other fields.

This movement has been very powerful and has provided a very sophisticated analysis of the current economic system of global capitalism. We should not fall into the trap laid by the mass media to identify this movement with the small minority of violent protesters. Please don’t talk of the violent people in the streets when you talk of the opposition to economic globalisation.

Asma Jahangir
Very briefly, I absolutely agree with the views of my teacher friends. I would like to bring a word of caution against talking of the family solely in terms of women. Globalisation ought to mean a greater role for men in the family so that women can be more active in public life, so that it is a proper globalisation not a male globalisation.

Hanna Suchocka
I would like to add a very short comment. I fully agree with the comments of President De Klerk, Mr. Vejvoda and the two teachers, because if we neglect variety and the differences we can devalue the whole process of globalisation. The interaction between globalisation and the collapse of the Polish socialist system is not very well recognised. I think that what was really attractive for the people living behind the Iron Curtain, was the diversity of the Western world. Now, after the collapse, if we were to try to create one common identity it would be a failure.

Josef Jařab
The final word is to the keynote speaker, Professor Giddens.

Anthony Giddens
I would like to thank everyone for their contributions. I think it was very interesting that an edge of disagreement emerged towards the end. These are highly controversial topics and one can’t be banal or consensual about them. There will be fundamental disagreements. I do disagree with what Mr Singh said about fundamentalism and about growth. The notion of fundamentalism first appeared in the 1950s; before that it wasn’t listed in dictionaries, although it was invented in the late 19th century to refer to American sects who didn’t believe in evolution.

When a term is new you can be fairly sure that phenomenon is in some part new. Fundamentalism is different from fanaticism and from traditional forms of dogmatism. It is a sort of re- invention of tradition in a world that calls for cosmopolitan values. It’s an aggressive re-invention of tradition. That’s why in some parts of the world people who used to perfectly well live side by side can no longer do so That’s why in certain religions that were highly ecumenical you have fundamentalist sects, including fundamentalists among Buddhists and other religious organisations. In many respects I think that fundamentalism is new and most students of the phenomenon agree it is new. It is not the same as religious fanaticism.

Second, I think the issue of growth is fundamental. I think that the UN targets of halving world poverty within a relatively short time can be met. But there’s no way that they can be met without economic growth. The thing is not to turn your back on growth, but to encourage growth that is ecologically decent and growth in which the poor participate. Those two aspects clash less than they used to. There is no future for the world’s poor without effective economic development.

I do agree with what you said about multiculturalism, because surely cosmopolitanism is an embrace of diversity. What has changed in our world is that there is nowhere to hide. Diversity used to function because of geographical separation for most of human history. There is no geographical separation any more, in the sense that we are in contact with different cultures all the time. The question is whether we can embrace this diversity or succumb to a fundamentalist assertion that our way of life is right and proper and other ones are wrong.

However I think there are limits to multiculturalism. There is so much lazy rhetoric at these conferences about multiculturalism. There is a finite point to multiculturalism. Otherwise it produces endless fragmentation and it goes against the universal ethics needed in a cosmopolitan world. Ultimately if there is a clash between multicultural identity and universal ethics, universal ethics must win. There must be universal notions of human rights sanctioned in international law and that law must count. I think that if anyone follows the debate about multiculturalism can see that we are beyond that. We need to reconcile a diversity of cultures with universal ethics.

That universal ethics must have universal purchase for us which can only be achieved through international law. That’s why I regard the Pinochet case, the truth commissions in South Africa, Latin America, etc., are all crucial parts of forming a global ethical consciousness.

I would end with a point about exclusion, about people being left out. I hope people will avoid lazy rhetoric on this issue. Please, it’s so easy to blame the Americans, capitalism or now globalisation, but it’s a ridiculous point of view. We have to ask two questions: Are the poor of the world poor? And: Are those who are excluded, excluded because they are not part of globalising processes or because they are? To my mind it is clear that it is because they are not part of globalising processes. The problem with Africa is that it has been left outside. During the Cold-War period, Africa had a strategic interest for the great powers; they no longer have a strategic interest, not even in South Africa. It is the responsibility of the world community to bring Africa into globalising processes and there are many concrete policies that can be introduced to do that.

The second thing is the reasons. Why are they excluded? Why are there so many poor in the world when there are so many affluent people living alongside them? Again one should avoid lazy rhetoric. One of the big problems of the world is not the global market, it is the state. Corrupt, over-extended, bureaucratic states in many parts of the world; Latin America and India have been mentioned as countries where the state is more of a problem than a solution. I feel that one should avoid all talk of Third World - that just implies a dependency that shouldn’t be there.

I feel that however poor a country is, it can make changes in the direction of more effective democracy and for effective government. You can only do that if you attack the issue of government and not blame outside forces. Poor countries like Botswana and Mozambique have made very effective transformations. Investment is needed. People will invest in countries if they have reliable institutions. Because what is the global economy? Forgive me, Professor Capra, it’s not just an endless mechanical flow of capital. It is people looking for decent returns on their investments. Those people can also be ourselves, because pension funds are major sources of investment. Capital will go to an area where people can reliably invest. It is up to us to close the circle. It can be done. We can have more effective control over globalisation processes. It is up to us to make this count and you won’t make it count if carry on with too much lazy rhetoric. Analysis of these issues and understanding these issues is therefore crucial - and there we come back to education.

Josef Jařab
Living in a country where we have been exposed to ideologies with anti-rhetoric it is very appealing to listen to someone talking about lazy rhetoric and using brave rhetoric.