European Identity - Individual, Group and Society - HumanitarianNet

THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE EUROPEAN IDENTITY IN THE SCHOOL ... 231also of the activities of DG EAC of the Commission as is clear throughseveral publications 15 .Schools as learning communities will flexibly apply the imposed orrecommended curriculum, taking the development of each pupil’spotential as the supreme rule. Knowledge will be gained (not transmitted)through teachers who facilitate knowledge (not only transmitters),thus allowing youths to discover the richness of the world andgiving them a taste for continuing to learn. Those teachers will call onoutside people —parents, business representatives, specialists— who cancomplement the education and provide a taste of future professions.The acquisition of personal, social, relational and other skills will bea key component of lifelong training. Schools will effectively encourageyoung people to engage in lifelong education and learning. To thatend, they will use all the educational and learning opportunities thatthe local community offers: they will collaborate with libraries, resourcecenters, businesses, museums, etc. We will come back to that whentalking about collaboration with the local community.Schools will insist on the importance of new information andcommunication techniques as a way of gaining knowledge and skills, andof establishing links with other learners and other learning communities.The concern for educational and learning quality will be reinforcedby self-assessment at all levels by inviting those involved to take part inthat assessment. They will constitute the beginning of real improvementefforts and not only a pretext for justifying so-called innovations.A learning community school will constantly ask itself questionsabout the innovations it is in the process of implementing and, for thatpurpose, it will weave a web of links with researchers and universitiesthat can help reinforce its activities.Learning communities and the schools belonging to it should maketo this effect maximum use of the outcomes of activities of theCommission in this field such as the ones described in the “Europeanreport on the quality of school education: sixteen quality educators” 16 .15Commission of the European Communities: three web site addresses withinformation on quality; quality in education:http://europa.eu.int/comm/education/socrates/observation/quality_en.htmlquality in school education:quality indicators and benchmarks:http://europa.eu.int/comm/education/indic/backen.htmlquality in higher education:http://europa.eu.int/comm/education/socrates/erasmus/recom.html16Commission of the European Communities; European Report on the Quality ofSchool Education, Brussels May 2000, 84 pages.