Manifest

European identity in times of crisis: manifesto of institutions of secondary school

On the Berlin meeting of the partners in october 2017 we discusses the documentst manifest. It containce in a way the essence of our experiences, it was accepted in the different institutions and shall be discussed with our political and social contacts.

 

The current symptoms of the crisis in Europe have been described in different ways since 2008:

As a social crisis, financial crisis or „refugee crisis“, the problems are associated with the conflicts with Russia or of Erdogan’s Turkey or with the phenomenon of populism.

With respect to the research and experiences of our ERASMUS+ project there are two fields of problems which push back heavily against a European identity:

1. The existence of different normality classes, which represent the increasing division of Europe. It is
2. The flight into a collective identity, especially between North- and South Europe, of a religious, spiritual or nationalistic kind, which leads to a particular-collective identity as xenophobia, populism, with a tendency even to a fascist kind.

In contrast to that we would like to stress the following strengths of our practice and articulate the following demands:

• The European culture, above all their literature, offers manifold examples for an open and plural kind of identity founding solidarity. Its implementation into the curricula of our school should be intensified.
• The immediate meeting of people of different countries in common projects and meetings fight sustainably against nationalism, racism and xenophobia. They should be an obligatory element of every school for adults.
• The practice of most secondary schools to choose active parts of the nomadic proletarians (refugees, migrants, sans papiers) as target groups is an immediate task of humanity within the tradition of thinkers as Kant or others.
• The free access to the offers of the secondary education is a fortunate phenomenon. It must be saved by a balance via money supports as BaföG and the decrease of low-paid employment at many schools.

And at least safe and secure employment for teachers at secondary schools and other institutions of secondary school system. The different payment for teachers that work on outputs for European projects (e.g. erasmus) is only a small example for the deplorable division of Europe into increasing normality classes.

• A European identity calls for multilingual competences. Every student in adult education should have the chance to learn at least two foreign languages. Therefore there should be creative as well as advanced IT-based methods.