European Identity - Individual, Group and Society - HumanitarianNet

THE EUROPEAN DIMENSION OF EDUCATION 91Kazepov (1997), and Osler (1997), in an evaluation of the Europeaneducation projects, affirmed that identities and feelings play anessential role in the development of citizenship and the learning of anactive citizenship.Osler (1997) points out that projects oriented to information ofrights but ignoring identities and feelings have been proven to beinadequate. Projects as well as training programs need to have anequilibrium between two complementary components of learning:information which acts in the cognitive dimension and feeling for theaffective dimension Among the conclusions we highlight:—It is not expected of the participants in the European projects todevelop a concept of Europe, moreover many of the participantsin the projects see the European Union as removed and distantfrom their daily lives.—The highlighted objective in most of the European projects was topromote the comprehension and value of other cultures, whichimplies an acceptance of different people and different behaviours.The students participating in the European analysed projects hadthe opportunity to explore and affirm their identities. As a resultof the contacts they expanded the comprehension of differencesand similarities, criticised their own education, but identity isstrongly rooted at the local level, regional, or national.The lack of a feeling of belonging to Europe shows up in researchsuch as the one developed by Dubois-Reymond (1997) with universitystudents or Ritchie (1997) with teachers. Also, in our context,interviews conducted with secondary students in a public school inBarcelona, confirmed the low development of a sense of Europeanbelonging and the predominance of a nationalistic sense (Spanish orCatalan identity) (Donoso and Massat, 1999; Bartolome and others,2000).From a global evaluation of these programs, proven contributionsinclude better understandings among people, countries, institutions,and cultures (mutual knowledge is necessary, since it is not possible tostimulate something unknown). They have allowed detection of thenecessity of fomenting new values and putting in evidence existentproblems and difficulties in the development of European identitywhich have different persons and groups that cohabit Europe, andhighlighting the importance and influence of others in the constructionof a feeling of belonging.