UNESCO REPORT, 2001
If we want this earth to provide for the needs of its
inhabitants, human society must undergo a transformation. (Preface)
We must rethink our way of organizing knowledge. This means
breaking down the traditional barriers between disciplines and
conceiving new ways to reconnect that which has been torn
apart. We have to redesign our educational policies and
programs. And as we put these reforms into effect we have to
keep our sights on the long term and honor our tremendous
responsibility for future generations. (Preface)
We should teach methods of grasping mutual relations and reciprocal
influences between parts and the whole in a complex world. (p. 12)
Humans are physical, biological, psychological, cultural,
social, historical beings. This complex unity of human nature
has been so thoroughly disintegrated by education divided
into disciplines that we can no longer learn what being
human means. This soluble connection between the unity
and the diversity of all that is human. (p. 12)
The history of the planetary era should be taught from its
beginnings in the sixteenth century, when communication was
established between all five continents. Without obscuring the
ravages of oppression and domination in the past and present,
we should show how all parts of the world have become
interdependent. (p. 13)
Every person who takes on educational responsibilities must be ready to go to the
forward posts of uncertainty in our times. (p. 13)
misunderstanding must be studied in its sources,
modalities and effects. This is all the more necessary in that
it bears on the causes instead of the symptoms of racism,
xenophobia, discrimination. And improved understanding
would form a solid base for the education-for-peace to which
we are attached by foundation and vocation. (p. 14)
Ethics cannot be taught by moral lessons. It must take shape in
people’s minds through awareness that a human being is at one
and the same time an individual, a member of a society, a
member of a species. Every individual carries this triple reality
within himself. All truly human development must include
joint development of individual autonomy, community
participation and awareness of belonging to the human species.
• From this point, the two great ethical/political finalities of the
new millennium take shape: establishment of a relationship of
mutual control between society and individuals by way of
democracy, fulfillment of humanity as a planetary community.
Education should not only contribute to an awareness of our
Earth-Homeland, it should help this awareness find expression
in the will to realize our earth citizenship. (p. 14)
According to Marx, ‘the products of the human mind appear as
independent beings, endowed with individual bodies, in
communication with humans and among themselves’.
Taking this one step further, we can say that beliefs and ideas
are not only products of the mind, they are also states of mind
that have life and power. That is why they can possess us. (p. 24-25)
Learning about learning, which includes integrating the learner into his knowledge, should be recognized by educators as a basic principle and permanent necessity. (p. 27)
The education of the future is faced with this universal
problem because our compartmentalized, piecemeal, disjointed
learning is deeply, drastically inadequate to grasp realities and
problems which are ever more global, transnational,
multidimensional, transversal, polydisciplinary and planetary. (p. 29)
General intelligence
As H. Simon expressed it, the human mind is a ‘GPS’ (General
Problems Setter and Solver). Contrary to what is widely
believed, developing general aptitudes of the mind improves
the capacity to develop particular or specialized skills. The
more powerful the general intelligence, the greater the ability
to treat special problems. Further, to understand specific data
we have to activate general intelligence which operates and
organizes the mobilization of knowledge of the whole for each
particular case.
As knowledge strives to build by reference to the context, the
global, the complex, it must mobilize what the knower knows
about the world. As François Recanati observed:
‘Understanding statements, far from being reduced to pure and
simple deciphering, is a non-modular process of interpretation
that mobilizes general intelligence and draws broadly on
knowledge about the world.’ There is a correlation between
mobilizing knowledge of the whole and activating general
intelligence.
Education should encourage the natural aptitude of the
mind to set and solve essential problems and, reciprocally,
should stimulate full exercise of general intelligence. This full
exercise requires the free exercise of the most well-distributed,
most vigorous faculty of children and adolescents – curiosity –
a faculty that is too often stifled by teaching, instead of being
stimulated as it should be or awakened if it is asleep. (p. 32)
Man is a thoroughly biological being but if he did not fully
dispose of culture he would be one of the lowest-ranking primates.
Culture accumulates that which is conserved, transmitted and
learned, including standards and principles of acquisition.
Man fulfils himself as a thoroughly human being only in and by
culture. There is no culture in the human brain (biological
apparatus able to act, perceive, know, learn), but there is no
mind, no spirit, no capacity for consciousness and thought,
without culture. The human mind is an emergence, created and
affirmed in the brain/culture relationship. Once the mind has
emerged it intervenes in cerebral function and retroacts with it.
This gives us a triad, a brain . mind . culture loop, where each
term is necessary to each of the others. The mind is an
emergence of the brain brought forth by culture and it would
not exist without the brain. (p. 43)
Culture is made up of the totality of knowledge, skills, rules,
standards, prohibitions, strategies, beliefs, ideas, values, and
myths passed from generation to generation and reproduced in
each individual, which control the existence of the society and
maintain psychological and social complexity. There is no
human society, either archaic or modern, without a culture, but
every culture is singular. There is always culture in cultures, but
culture exists only through cultures. (p. 46)