Abstract
Europe and the European Union are close in values, in culture and in attitudes. Yet the EU has made little attempt to jointly reinforce the emotional attachment to Europe. Member States stress their differences in national identity through education and language. When the EU made the borderlines between European countries less visible, the language boundary remained, standing in the way of easy communication between citizens of different EU countries. We advance the “Learning Union” as a necessary complement to the EU. The Learning Union has three components: contributing to a sense of European belonging, the “communication EU” as well as the “competency EU”. Belonging should be reinforced by aiming the content of education at underlining the common heritage, history and the common future. In communication every EU citizen should learn in school to be competent in one common European language (English is the likely candidate), next to one’s own language. Competency is essential for competitiveness. Competency is bred by learning in settings decided by pedagogics, not by (the whims of) well-meaning politicians. The Learning Union is at “arm’s length” distance from Governments with autonomy and funding designed to incentivize learning goals as well as equality of opportunity.
Gratefully acknowledging comments on an earlier version by Holger Burckhart and Eduardo Marcal Grilo.
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- 1.
Universities and higher education institutions are used interchangeably throughout this book.
- 2.
Winners or winning teams in international competitions between athletes who compete for their nations, or national teams that exhibit this identity by singing the national anthem.
- 3.
However, can one have a sense of "belonging” to different nations if the values expressed by these nations do not match? This is the often debated question around dual citizenship.
- 4.
Since the Treaty of Rome education has traditionally been regarded as an area of the national states, precisely by being associated with the idea of national identity.
- 5.
In this specific case the goals may just as well have been composed to strengthen national citizenship.
- 6.
This conclusion was drawn from an online survey among foreign students at nine universities in Austria, Belgium, Italy, Norway and Poland at the end of the 2008–2009 academic year, as well as 40 in-depth interviews and five focus groups, conducted at the universities of Antwerp, Innsbruck, Oslo, Rome and Warsaw in 2009–2010.
- 7.
This is exactly what post-secondary vocational programmes lack. As the OECD (2014) rightly notes, these programmes “go by a host of different names in different countries, hampering their capacity to compete with clearer brands, such as academic degrees. A clearly recognised international nomenclature would improve their status and make comparison easier.”
- 8.
These rankings are mostly based on the research performance of universities. They are the only transparent information about universities available to the best and brightest from outside Europe and the US who want to study at a “top university”. The research accomplishments of the university are taken as a proxy for the educational training of the university.
- 9.
PIAAC is the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies, measuring these competencies in 23 OECD countries, of which 17 EU countries or regions in 2011.
- 10.
A non-European example is Australia: despite relatively good performance in PISA rankings, graduates score in the lower segment of the PIAAC distribution.
- 11.
Equality of opportunity seems to be far better safeguarded in Europe than in the US: private costs in the US are on average much higher than in Europe, while the public resources for student aid are the same. The US may be losing some ground compared to Europe in the global shifts in the race to develop human capital. However, both the US as Europe seem to have lost some ground compared to the increasing competition from Asia, visible in the worldwide rankings. At the same time the European systems of higher education continue to be regressive in their impact on income inequality: higher and middle income groups benefit disproportionally. In achieving equality of opportunity “affirmative action” can play a role as a way of channelling attention to the participation of underprivileged groups to HE. The US has shown that “affirmative action” can contribute to equality of opportunity (Pusser 2004). The generally perceived decline in equality of opportunity in the US can be seen against the background of the withdrawal of affirmative action policies, without augmenting funds available for compensating for “capital market restrictions” (the means to acquire funding to participate) through other means.
- 12.
On average across OECD countries.
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Ritzen, J., Neeleman, A., Teixeira, P. (2017). European Identity and the Learning Union. In: Ritzen, J. (eds) A Second Chance for Europe. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57723-4_8
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