Paris, September 11 {No.2000-82} - Education - its challenges, purpose and potential in the age of electronic communication - was the subject of a lively debate, Building Learning Societies: Knowledge, Information and Human Development, organised by UNESCO, the World Bank and Germany's Foundation for International Development as part of EXPO2000 in Hanover (Germany), on September 6 to 8.

During three days, some 100 participants from a wide range of professional and social backgrounds sought to examine the key challenge of the new millennium: how to utilise the tools of the communications revolution to combat the growing marginalisation of large segments of the world's population in the face of the explosion of knowledge and information. Debates reflected divergent views on the very terms chosen in the title of the event. Each of the concepts evoked - "knowledge", "information" and "development" - were questioned.

The first speaker to address the five workshop sessions held during the event was pharmacologist Susan Greenfield of Oxford University (UK) who challenged received ideas about the brain, looking at its physiological functions. Examining "what makes the brain become a mind", she pointed out that "the whole is more than the sum of its parts" and disputed the notion that intelligence is genetically pre-determined, stressing the important role of stimulation and experience in developing the mind and its ability to learn. She also insisted that there are many different forms of intelligence and went on to dispute the idea that the brain atrophies with age, arguing that the assimilation of new knowledge and therefore education is possible throughout life.

Adama Ouane, Director of the Hamburg-based UNESCO Institute for Education which co-organised the event, said that "the recent findings of neuroscientists substantiate the belief that education should not be confined to childhood and youth."

The Vice-Chancellor and President of the University of Canberra (Australia), Don Aitkin, addressed a session on "Turning Education Around" and argued that if an answer is to be found to the world's most pressing problems - over-population, destruction of the environment and bad governance - education will have to be extended and improved for all people everywhere. "If there is an answer," he said, "it lies in the capacity of human beings to adapt their behaviour once they know of their situation and understand its context. In order for that to occur, they must be well educated enough to read about and discuss matters at a relatively high level of abstraction. [...] Education for everybody has to be the kernel of the world strategy", he urged.

But Leila Iskandar Kamal of Egypt, an anthropologist and social activist who works with Cairo's garbage collectors and landless farmers in the south of Egypt, denounced the fact that "20% of the world's population is plundering 80% of the world's resources". She decried the failure of the academic establishment to take into account the knowledge and the wisdom of traditional societies and urged the world to cease trying to define its so-called underdeveloped communities. The 20% of the world population who set the development and educational agenda know nothing about the knowledge of the world's remaining 80% of the population, she said.

Munir Fasheh, Director of The Arab Education Forum at the Harvard University (USA) Center for Middle Eastern Studies, denounced the very concept of "development" as a Western insult to the majority of the world's population and criticised as "criminal" educational systems that label children as failures.

Similarly, Boubacar Sadou Ly, Secretary-General of the Association for the Promotion of Education in the Sahel and Savannah (Burkina Faso), denounced the imbalance in today's educational systems, which emphasise information at the expense of wisdom. He advocated a more holistic approach to education, mindful of the learner's cultural heritage and the needs of the community.

While the potential of new information and communication technologies to contribute to education featured highly in the debates, with examples of private and public initiatives to utilise the Internet to meet the information and training needs of local communities, there was agreement that these technologies do not, by themselves, provide the key to building learning societies.

The event closed with the launch of the first International Adult Learners' Week on the afternoon of September 8, International Literacy Day, in a televised debate called Platform for the Future, which brought together Edelgard Bulmahn, Germany's Federal Minister for Education and Research, and Seydou Sanan, Education Minister of Burkina Faso, and featured messages from UNESCO Director-General Koïchiro Matsuura and United Kingdom Education Secretary David Blunkett.

In his message, Mr Matsuura notably declared: "Opening up access to knowledge for adults is becoming one of the most widespread forms of education. Three adults in five are now involved in formal or non-formal processes of acquiring new knowledge, and it is envisaged that, in the information societies to come, enrolment in adult education will considerably exceed that of children and young people in school. It is therefore heartening to note that more than forty countries from all regions, developed and developing alike, are already organising learning festivals and celebrating Adult Learners' Week." UNESCO's Member States decided to celebrate the Week in their 30th session in 1999. It aims to celebrate learning and learners through all types of events that can highlight the pride of learning and the challenges of learning.

Meanwhile, at UNESCO Headquarters, International Literacy Day was marked by a celebration of the struggle against illiteracy with UNESCO's acting Assistant Director-General for Education, Jacques Hallak, who deplored the fact that "the right to education is still not accessible to all." Quoting Paolo Freire, he further declared: "Literacy is much, much more than reading and writing. It is the ability to read the world, it is the ability to continue to learn and it is the key to the door of knowledge."