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Knowledge Systems for Sustainable Development

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    • Training and scientific knowledge : essential components of education
      • Training starts with trainers - Hélène AHRWEILER

Training starts with trainers - Hélène AHRWEILER

In France, education issues are focused on the transmission of knowledge. But we should remember that the essential task is to impart a taste for knowledge and a liking for learning. This should lead to a change in the training of trainers and sometimes to forgetting the official curriculum. But we must not forget that education is conveyed primarily by family, language, and traditions.

In my own experience, I have found that any time something goes awry, education gets the blame. However, education is not the solution, it is in fact the problem!

We need to know how to share knowledge and infrastructures, as in times of old, we knew how to share bread. He who gives and he who receives are both the richer. The use of available instruments must therefore be explained, and in order to do so, enquiries made on how to train the teachers, how to train the trainers; this is the first condition for success.

Scientists, however, find that transmitting their knowledge is a problem.

We know how to teach, generally speaking. We know how to teach how this should be done, i.e. pedagogy. However, there is one thing we are not very good at, in France anyway, and that is to make known, to give others a taste and a liking for knowledge. We are very dependent on the media, but our notions of time are not identical: journalists do not understand that researchers have a right to make mistakes and that their work takes place in another time frame...

Two evils afflict the world today. The first is illiteracy as demonstrated by the incapacity to analyse the syntax of a sentence, and therefore inability to undertake a scientific or literary study of any kind. A recent study conducted by the Académie de Paris revealed that the population of Paris schools includes 17% of illiterates. This is particularly the case in the periphery of the city, considerably more deprived than the city centre.

The second evil is images and the language of imagery. Few people are able to comment, to read with correct syntax, a series of pictures (apart from films), and yet today we live in a society obsessed by imagery. As a results, many individuals are ill-adapted to the world they live in.

Schools must therefore contribute to fighting these evils and this type of ignorance. In order to do that, it would seem that training needs to be approached through partnerships, in particular with actors in the private sector and in the very areas where the individuals concerned are living. However, training trainers is a more difficult task that training children. Clearly, the first phase of the education concerns adults, and teachers in particular, who then relay the information to children. This is a problem in that it is difficult to change the habits of teachers who have been trained to perfection, or at least to believe that is the case. Let us not forget that when we tried to introduce new programmes, none of the new subjects have ever managed to gain a foothold in the traditional programmes.

We should therefore abandon the official curriculum and start off with the type of ideas that Mr. Charpak recommends in "La Main à la Pâte". This is the kind of course which could have a considerable impact and be an example.

Nor should we forget that education and schooling are not synonymous. The foundations of education are laid by the family, in a country-specific environment, in a tradition that cannot be shared on an immediate basis with anyone else, and schools comes as an adjunct. It is through his native language that an individual "enters" into culture, civilisation, and humanity. Language is truly fundamental, the origin of everything else, even though other essential languages exist.

To learn another language is a humbling and mind-changing experience for an individual. Mastering a foreign language leads to the discovery that other people do not ask the same questions in the same fashion and that they start from different standpoints.

This discovery leads to wondering about one's own origins, and their importance. Nor should we forget that apart from other languages, there is also the language of science, of economics, of arts, and body language, which have great significance, in particular as regards self-confidence. To control one's own body is a step in the direction of self-harmony and progress. With that in mind, perhaps the most important school of all is the kindergarten. There is the space where one learns that you must take someone's hand to cross the street, and move to other horizons.