Towards an Interactive Project on European Civilization for High School Students
Declaration of The Academy of Yuste, the 19th of June 2008
In the past half century, a peculiar political construct has emerged from the combination of European states: The European Union is more than a confederation, but less than a federation; more than just a free trade zone, but not quite an economic whole; almost a world power, but one without an army or an effective foreign policy of its own; with a common currency, the euro, but with coins that reserve a different verso for each member state. And yet, taken together, in less than a lifetime, these are major achievements.
The Europeans do not speak the same language and hence do not understand each other well enough to differ or agree. But quite apart from the confusion of tongues, opinions everywhere are shaped within separate national frameworks. What is passionately debated in one country is often not even an issue in adjacent countries where a different agenda prevails.
In many respects, however, the debate on the European constitution represented a turning point in the formation of European public space. Not only did the proposed constitution evoke intense exchanges in each member state, it also elicited a vivid interest in the discussions going on in the other member states. No matter how contested, a common agenda held sway over the audiences in the countries of Europe.
During those discussions it became apparent once again that Europeans have an often vivid but usually vague image of what European identity and European civilization stand for. This is hardly surprising.
A European history of Europe is as yet in the pioneering stage at the academic level, textbooks of European history at the high school level are still extremely rare, and the few that circulate have been produced and introduced within a national framework.
And yet, if Europeans are to understand their similarities and differences, they must be able to refer to a minimal but shared understanding of European civilization. Such a common base of knowledge must be conveyed at the most advanced stage of education that is still attended by - almost - all youngsters: the last years of high school, the age of sixteen and beyond. These young adolescents represent the target audience for a curriculum conveying what all European school children should learn about Europe.
But pointing out the necessity of such an endeavor does not equal a demonstration of its feasibility. There are many obstacles on the road toward a shared European syllabus and that road is littered with the remains of failure.
The European Union now counts 27 member states, some of them only recently liberated from a totalitarianism in its latest phase of exhausted authoritarianism. In these countries nationalism can be expressed for the first time after a lifetime of communist dictatorship, often preceded by a period of a fascist regime, equally oppressive or even more so. The present pressures of globalization and Europeanization reinforce a chauvinist inward turn, even in many member states that have been democracies for most of the past century.
The member states do not share a common history, and if they were part of the same events at all, it often was on different, hostile sides. They all have ministries of education and school boards that determine the curriculum, but these are quite unlikely to allow an outside agency to meddle with it, least of all the European Commission, which lacks the legal authority to do so in the first place.
There is an added complication. Even in single member states, there may be controversy between the national center and the periphery, quite often striving for greater autonomy, also in a cultural sense. The search for such a regional identity usually begins with a revision of the history of the nation. After all, national unification more often than not meant regional defeat. Nevertheless, in most countries, students and teachers from every region do rejoice in the fame and glory of their national heroes and geniuses.
On a European scale, things may be very different. Imagine a European canon of, say, fifty items… It would be a conservative bet to estimate that at least half of those items would have originated in France, England or Germany… very few great feats will have been taken from, say, the Baltic, the Balkan or even the Scandinavian countries. This is partly due to a parallax: the ethnocentric view of historians in the core countries, forgetful of the accomplishments, geniuses and great events of the countries at the margin. In part, this is the consequence of the marginal position of these countries for the largest part of their history, which prevented them from developing the centers of learning and culture that are a necessary condition for such great achievements. Yet, it may be difficult to accept for students and teachers in these nations that there is little mention of what their ancestors did accomplish during he past centuries.
Thus, if we are to circumvent national closure, the arrogance of the core and the resentment of the periphery, we must adopt a radically different approach to the dissemination of an idea of European civilization among young adolescents. A single canon of European history is bound to further ignite nationalist sentiment and regional reproach. It will be viewed as an alien imposition by the educational authorities of the member countries, and it is sure to be widely rejected before long. A canon, fixed, closed and imposed, runs against the very notion of the variety of European civilization it is meant to convey in the first place.
In stead of this canonical perspective, we need an approach that focuses on the connections between scholars, reformers and artists across the continent. We must show the networks of correspondence and conversation that linked these innovators together and carried new ideas and practices across large distances. For each particular theme, we should trace the contacts between people in different locations, linked by a common fascination. They wrote one another to share their ideas and traveled to meet and learn from one another. They left home to gain an audience for their inventions and learn about the innovations by their foreign colleagues. They returned home and introduced new ideas and practices in their own country.
In this approach, European civilization is not portrayed as a homogeneous process of dissemination from a few peaks of excellence towards the endless plains of mediocrity, but rather as a network of networks of correspondents and travelers, engaged in an ongoing and open conversation about the topics that made up this multifarious, diverse and yet coherent evolution of ideas and practices.
Since we are dealing with young people of the 21st century, the teaching materials must be not only verbal but also visual and auditive. The highly abstract ideas that make up the concept of civilization must be made more concrete by choosing specific examples that appeal to the youthful imagination and yet have parallels in their own environment.
Let us begin with an example. No doubt, one of the defining episodes in the present approach to European civilization was the turn towards empirical science. Scholars no longer mostly limited themselves to a discussion of the biblical sources and the masters of antiquity, but began to experiment, manipulate instruments, and investigate nature. A critical moment came with the discovery of the techniques to grind lenses and assemble them, in telescopes that served to observe the vast celestial expanse, and in microscopes with which ‘God’s creation may be discovered in a droplet of water (Anthony Leeuwenhoek)‘ Lenses are very familiar to contemporary youngsters, they wear them to improve their eyesight and they carry them in the cameras of their mobile phones. (It may not even have occurred to them that their own eyes function in much the same way). The fundamentals of optics are not too hard to understand. At the time, lens grinding was a craft that allowed gifted young people without means to make a living and work together with the great minds of their day. Before long, all over the continent scholars and craftsmen were experimenting with the construction of telescopes and microscopes. Scientists and dilettantes were exploring the skies and the tiniest of creatures. Thus the theme of experiential science can be taught by discussing the lens as a pars pro toto. In dealing with the development of optical instruments and the use to which these innovations were put, we should not bother to much with the question who was the original inventor, nor concentrate solely on the great geniuses of empirical discovery, but try to trace the connections between craftsmen, scholars, explorers across the continent.
We need not deal with each an every aspect of European civilization, if ever that were possible. There should be a dozen themes which together cover the major aspects of civilization in Europe during the past five hundred years or so and which connect with the disciplines being taught at the high school level. In each case, the presentation will focus on the interaction between innovators in many parts of Europe. It is not necessary to make an exhaustive inventory of all the inventors and discoverers who participated in this exchange of ideas and techniques. The subject of instruction is the network of innovators, but the method of instruction may follow the same pattern: teachers and students in the many countries of the Union may themselves contribute their account of events that occurred in their own area. In other words, as we present these historical conversations about major themes of civilization, we invite our young contemporaries to join a conversation about those conversations.
If ever the medium was the message, it is in this case. We are living in the early age of the internet. The outcome we should work toward will be a large website carrying contributions from school classes (and their mentors) from all over Europe. The project can only succeed if it uses the potential of electronic communication to the fullest extent. At its heart is a website, where brief editor’s introductions to each theme are available for downloading. These must be captivating and inspiring audiovisual presentations, eliciting reactions from teachers and their students from all over the EU. English will be the first language of communication, but contributions in German, French, Polish, and Spanish will be featured with equal prominence (and hopefully with a translation in English)
Yet, every theme on the website remains ‘unfinished’: Each one presents a particular strand of European civilization as an enduring and wide-spread conversation between scholars, reformers or artists. But at the same time it poses a question to the audience: What happened in your area during that epoch, what contacts were established, and who participated in the invention, the dissemination and transformation of these ideas and practices? Each program also is an ongoing invitation to participate and reciprocate, to ‘upload’ texts and images that may enhance the original program and add to the overall picture of innovation and dissemination.
Why should teachers and their students want to participate in this grand scheme? First of all, the website contains introductory texts, teaching materials and links to other sites, concerning every theme. The site expands as school classes and their teachers contribute accounts of the ways their region was connected to the rest of Europe with regard to this particular theme. Teachers may download the material and use it in their classes as they see fit. No educational authority, no school board need to be involved. At most, the principal and other teachers are to be consulted about a particular project that a class may undertake. Thus, the teacher of physics may decide to work together with a colleague who teaches English, or history for that matter, so as to set up a common project. In a later phase school classes in different regions may decide to collaborate on scholarly exchanges concerning a particular theme that once took place between their areas. Gradually the site will come to carry more and more collective projects uploaded by the participating school classes and their teachers. It will never present a complete or balanced view of European civilization, but it will increasingly come to embody what it set out to explore: European civilization as a network of conversations and encounters, this time carried out by the young students themselves.
Students, or teachers, or even schools may take up the challenge and do research on the local antecedents of one or even all of the themes. They may use locally available material in encyclopedias, history books, archives or hold interviews with the experts. Next, they may upload their work for publication on the website. An editorial board will check these contributions, evaluate them and decide to feature them on the pertinent website page. The challenge for teachers and students is to show to a wider audience on the web what was achieved during preceding centuries in their particular area as part of the encompassing European panorama. Their motivation may hold an element of chauvinism: ‘We, too, played a part in the grand scheme of European civilization’. But there is a dialectics to it: ‘we, too, were and are shaped by the overarching European civilization.
In embarking on this project, this is what we are betting on: the readiness of students and teachers to use the material offered and to add to it by composing their own accounts. We can only hope that they will be enticed to participate in an all-European project, showing their peers what their region’s part in the overall scheme has been and in doing so creating their own part in the present.
So as to create an additional incentive, awards will be given for the best contributions by a school class (and its teacher(s)). One might think of a trip to Brussels, the capital of Europe, or to Yuste, the seat of the Foundation of the European Academy of Yuste.
The list of themes is tentative, provisional and essentially open. We need not draft a definitive inventory of European civilization, we must propose a dozen themes that may inspire and provoke, and prompt others to propose additional themes to be presented according to the formula outlined here.
One obvious theme is the emergence of postal networks across the European continent, the vey development that enabled its inhabitants to correspond by letter and to visit their counterparts in person. And, just as the introduction of the lens transformed the concept of space, the idea of time was profoundly altered by geologists and biologists who went out in the field to study rock formations and fossils. In this case, too, we should concentrate on the explorations by ‘naturalists’, on the supporting crafts and innovative techniques.
At this point one may suggest many other themes, such as ‘polyphony’, to be illustrated by the vicissitudes of the keyboard (its predecessors and its descendants, such as the electronic musical devices, so familiar to the youth of today). Another theme to be considered is the evolution of portrait painting (in an age of omnipresent cameras). Still another theme might be the popular novel (‘colportage roman’), a genre that emerged with the spread of type-setting and printing.
Abstract themes such as the evolution of representative democracy may be approached by focusing on the vicissitudes of the ballot as the pars pro toto: the one piece of paper high school students have NOT yet seen). Rather than confront the grand subject of religion head on, one might begin with a seemingly innocuous pars pro toto: ‘the seventh day’ of rest, observed by all religions, albeit on a different day of the week by Jews and Muslims, and respected even by secular regimes as a weekly day of leisure.
Whatever the themes, they must be made to appeal to young people and their teachers all over the continent by focusing not on great men, great discoveries and great events, but on the enduring continental exchange of ideas and techniques. We must select concrete objects and practices that were disseminated across the continent and that still constitute a recognizable element in the lives of today’s young students. Admittedly, this is quite a challenge. That is why we need all the expertise and inventiveness of the Academy of Yuste, its members and its friends. But in its own small way, this project mirrors the richness and the diversity of that assembly. Precisely for this reason, the Academy of Yuste with its commitment to individual excellence and a shared dedication to the European ideal, may be best suited to initiate the present project.
We are in no position to impose teaching materials upon the schools of Europe. Nobody is. Since we cannot dictate we must seduce. The subject matter must be presented so attractively that teachers will be swayed to adopt them in their classes. Possibly the entire series will be used in English class, or for that matter in the history program, or in courses patterned after the American ‘civilization 101’ syllabus. For that, teachers do not need a decision by the national ministry of education or the regional school board, they may decide on their own, or as the case may be, after consultation with their principal and their peers.
We do not need to take up all themes at once, in stead a few themes may be adopted and elaborated on a tentative basis. If the formula (because that is what it is) turns out to be successful, it is quite conceivable that others will adopt it and use it to produce programs of their own that may be disseminated as widely. And, of course, we can only hope that teachers and students themselves will contribute original and useful material to the project.
Where do we go from here? In the Declaration of the Academy, read at the awards ceremony of June 18th 2008 in the presence of the HRH, the King and Queen of Spain, assembled dignitaries, and the members of the Academía Europea de Yuste, we proposed a brief version of the present plan.. Since then, we have been experimenting with a website that carried brief introductions to a handful of themes. These indeed elicited a number of preliminary reactions from school classes and their teachers across Europe. We are now ready to create a more definitive website which may then be presented publicly and serve as the hub for contributions from schools all over the EU.
The two main tasks at present are to create introductions (‘invitations’), fit for the internet, to a number of themes, as outlined above; and, to create an architecture and design for the site that meets current internet standards and tastes. The site has two different but closely related user categories: teachers and pupils. They may be directed to different pages on the site, but anyone has access to everything on the site.
Once traffic begins to move, it is time to make an application for a grant to an outside funding agency run it, pay the editorial board and the staff, monitor, edit and translate the contributions, maintain contact with the collaborating teachers and their schools and fund the awards.
In one respect, we must not compromise. The basic text and the schools’ contributions must be translated in English (if they weren’t written in that language in the first place) and preferably in other languages among those adopted for the site. This is a costly and fragile operation. But technically it is easy to run texts in several languages on a website.
What became clear during the experimental phase of the project was that the basic conception - European civilization as a network of networks of correspondences and conversations around particular, enduring and pervasive themes - may seem obvious and attractive at first glance, but that it is very remote from the everyday notion of European civilization. Quite a few contributions presented the attractions and specialties of the school’s region or sought to highlight the contributions its outstanding inhabitants made to Europe’s cultural or scientific history. The idea that correspondences and conversations may be at the core of civilizational evolution takes a while to get accustomed to. More than anything else, the presentation of contributions that clearly incorporate the basic ideas of the project will help students and teachers to get acquainted with the formula.
In the period since the first launching of the initiative, the elaboration of the basic idea has been altered: The notion of an interactive website has become more and more central. Apart from practical considerations, many substantive issues have been resolved, but a few considerations concerning content remain open: What time frame should be adopted: should we start in Antiquity or even Biblical times? Or could we begin at the end of the Middle Ages, the beginning of the Renaissance? One might begin around 1500, select the starting point that best fits a given theme and wait to see how far back contributors want to go.
The same applies to geography: the most obvious point of departure is the EU in its present configuration. But for some themes, the story may go beyond those confines, and contributions may come in that deal with areas beyond the present Union.
The solid support that chronology provides to the teaching of history is abandoned in this project for a ‘polythematic’ approach, in which the course of each theme is traced separately from the others, often meandering from one area of Europe to another. At some point the need will arise for essays that may connect the various themes and provide a common chronological framework and an encompassing interpretation.
How do we deal with topics that remain as contentious as ever, but cannot be ignored: religion, for example, or politics?
Should we remain silent on ‘the dark side of Europe’ and leave out the sadder sides of the history of European expansion, i.e. colonialism and imperialism, slavery and exploitation. How are the devastations of capitalist production to be dealt with? Can we at this point provide an account of totalitarianism, i.e. communism, national socialism and fascism? Can the diffusion of racism and xenophobia be dealt with as one more ‘theme’, or for that matter, the episodes of deadly mass warfare and genocide? How could these subjects ever be presented satisfactorily, so as to reach the youngsters of so many European countries with so many and such divergent memories of suffering? Posing the question is answering it: At some point, even the dark side must be dealt with. But we need not do it all at once. We may learn by doing. Other authors may come up with a feasible approach, so that at some point these most difficult topics may be introduced within the framework outlined here.
We need not solve all problems at once, we need not complete the project in one stroke. In stead, we may try one step after another and see where it leads us. Thus, the website could become a gift from an older generation of Europeans to the youngest. No assembly is better suited to promote this project in a collaboration of its members and their friends than our most diverse and knowledgeable Academía Europea de Yuste.
Appendix
The Members of the Academía Europea de Yuste, after nomination by the members of the Academy in their General Assembly, are appointed by the Board of Trustees of the Fundación Academia Europea de Yuste, consisting of the president of the junta of Extremadura and the ministers of culture of those European countries that were part of the Empire under Charles V (1519—1556), represented by their ambassadors in Spain. Academicians are installed by HRH King Juan Carlos of Spain on the occasion of the presentation of the Charles V award, once every two years in Yuste.