European Identity - Individual, Group and Society - HumanitarianNet

164 EUROPEAN IDENTITY. INDIVIDUAL, GROUP AND SOCIETYschools, in the shops and banks, as they encounter people workingand at leisure, and through the mass media. The professionals andother adults who are responsible for children and young people’sdevelopment and learning in these spheres are many and varied.Parents play a particular role, as do teachers. But there are also manyother significant professional workers —early childhood workers, socialpedagogues, youth workers, social workers. All of these professionsneed to be prepared to work with children and young people todevelop social, economic and political understanding within the newand developing social relationships of Europe.How should educators develop identity and civic behaviour?Children and young people need to be helped acquire the skills andvalues that will be needed for he new persons, groups and societiesthat will be he future of Europe. These values are going to be differentfrom the old values. They are going to be values that can address andperhaps resolve the multiple values and identities that will be inevitablein the Europe that is developing. This is both a controversial issue in itsown right, and also is about teaching how to deal with controversy.Values and opinions, viewpoints and argument, conflict and resolutionare at the very heart of this. But these are areas that our educationaltraditions are singularly ill equipped to tackle. A great many people—parents, politicians, and mot least pupils— see education as beingabout the transmission of knowledge. The teacher “knows”, the pupildoes not know. Therefore pupil’s ideas are, by definition, not relevantto the educational process.Take as an example the notion of a question. Normally, a question isused to find something out. “Can you tell me the way to the University?”usually means that the person asking the question doesn’t know wherethis is located, and hopes that the person asked will be able to givedirections on how to get there.Classroom discourse is dominated by teachers asking questions.Questions asked by teachers are also used to “find something out’, butthe something is rather different. If a teacher in a classroom askedexactly the same question, many pupils would interpret the question asfollows:“The teacher knows the way there. What she or he wants toknow is ‘Which pupils have this information?’ The teacher is testingus —she/he knows the correct answer, and is trying to match myanswer against ours, to see if we are correct”.This is a very widespread characteristic of teaching:—it is the teacher who asks the questions