In a recent essay on the future of Europe, the French historian Jacques Le Goff concludes that "Europe's main raw material is unquestionably its grey matter." The Commission White Paper Teaching and Learning: Towards the Learning Society includes that quotation in its conclusions. Developing human potential by investing in education and training is a masterkey for Europe's future economic and social well-being.
We face a dual challenge in this respect. Across Europe, the task is both to broaden access to education and training and to raise people's motivation for learning experiences on a lifelong basis.
This presupposes, of course, that awareness of the need for lifelong learning itself exists in the first place.
This year, the European Year of Lifelong Learning, will contribute to meeting these challenges. About 150 projects have already been approved in principle, including media events, conferences and promotional activities.
The continuously changing societies in which we now live must become continuously learning societies. Improving access, raising individual commitment and tapping potential - these demand more open and flexible education and training contexts, learning processes and forms of accreditation and progression. The central problem is to find ways to bring about these changes.
The emphasis on the term 'learning' is by no means coincidental. It signals a shift of focus towards individuals and their needs and demands. This is simply a logical consequence of the diversity of circumstances in which people live.
It does not imply encouraging a purely self-interested individualism that uncaringly elbows its way through life, disregarding the importance of community and social justice.
Education and training systems and practices should respond to their participants rather than the other way around. Individuals, as active citizens, must be encouraged and empowered to take on more responsibility for planning and carrying through their own personal and professional development on a lifelong basis.
The United Kingdom, it can be noted with interest, is a Member State in which considerable emphasis is placed upon individual responsability for the acquisition of qualifications and skills. The idea that there is a close link between individual employability and competence levels and profiles is embedded in the logic of British education and training systems. This perspective accords well with the analysis of the White paper.
The Commission supports lifelong learning as a mainstream element of the concept and practice of education and training at all levels.
The reasons for this support are both social and economic.
Economic and social change go together and are interdependent. The White Paper emphasises that education and training is essentially about personal development and social integration. For most of us, this cannot take place without active participation in economic and political life, as workers and as citizens. This participation can take diverse forms, and must be based on freedom of choice.
But active participation is the foundation, the expression and the exercise of citizenship rights and responsibilities. The White Paper, in bringing education and employment for Europe's future into closer relationship with each other, acknowledges the central role that work and employment play for people's social integration and their sense of identity and self-worth in modern societies.
Europe has entered what the Bangemann report has plainly called a new industrial revolution.
Technological advance is continuously transforming workplace contexts, occupational profiles and job tasks. The accompanying 'knowledge explosion' places great demands on individual capacities not only to learn and re- learn, but also to achieve higher levels of skill and qualification across a broader range of complex competencies.
The severity of Europe's unemployment problem and the urgent need to resolve it needs no development here. But one can see the obvious link between unemployment, economic exclusion and educational level. We need just one figure to demonstrate this: in Europe, the graduate unemployment rate is half that for those with lower-level qualifications. If education is no longer the protection it used to be against the threat of unemployment, the fact is that those with the lowest or no qualifications are at very high risk of unemployment. A poor education goes together with a poor position in the labour market.
Furthermore, unequal access to the new technologies is likely to exacerbate these inequalities unless concerted action is taken.
Some people are especially vulnerable to being 'left behind' in the scramble to keep up with changing labour market demands: the young unqualified, those over 45, women with family responsibilities, members of minorities and migrant families, the disabled and those with special needs.
Many have littlles jeunes sans diplôme et les moins qualifiés