by Søren Hegstrup

On my way home from the World Congress of the Federation Internationale des Communautes Educatives (FICE) in Glasgow last September, the urge to write an article became ever more pressing - not a scientific article, but rather a specialist essay which, being the short and personal genre, allows me, in this particular case, to air a social indignation.

It is a very private indignation which cannot readily be documented, and so will be left unsubstantiated, similar to the astronomic figures we are presented with daily when we hear about disasters around the world, figures which we cannot fathom, precisely because they elude comprehension. We are denied the possibility of contextual understanding. We are simply unable to comprehend!

FICE holds a biennial world Congress. In 2004 it was Glasgow’s turn to host the arrangement. More specifically; the University of Strathclyde provided the actual venue.

The day before the distinguished opening ceremony, the delegates held a sort of board meeting - a Federal Council as it is called. The meeting started with the Russian delegate speaking about the terrible tragedy in Beslan. We were, of course, well-informed about this, and because everyone had been virtually inundated with blow-by-blow accounts of the episode from day one, it seemed doubly horrifying to have to hear it all again. Everyone (approximately 50 people from all over the world) had their own clear images popping up.

The Russian delegate was clearly immensely touched by the situation, and I could not blame her for becoming emotional. But it was very trying to listen to the account which lasted the best part of an hour. No details were left out. After the presentation, we were asked by the President of FICE to stand and keep one minute’s silence. What kind of thoughts pass through your head in one such long minute?

My thoughts wandered back to a congress I went to eight years ago in Florence, hosted by the World Health Organisation. One contribution concerned relief work in Africa: one overhead after another bore witness to unfathomable wretchedness. One showed that every year more than one million children simply disappear without trace. Possible explanations include kidnapping for everything from slavery, prostitution to experiments in the medicinal industry.

This led my thoughts back to the time when I first read the WHO’s estimates that (at least) 40 – 50,000 children die, worldwide, from hunger. This does not include children dying from diseases or accidents and disasters. In India, it is estimated that, every year, more than two million children never make it to their first birthday. In addition, I must confess that I also thought of the many Chechnian children who, every year, end their lives on a Russian bayonet.

During the Congress, I stayed in student lodgings, as did a number of the other delegates. In the evening following this eventful day, I was sitting in a small kitchenette with a South African colleague, Francisco Cornelius, letting the events of the day pass by. I asked him what he was thinking of during the one-minute silence. He returned my question with a “What did you think, Søren?” I told him of my train of thought and that I felt it had been one of the most difficult minutes I had experienced recently.

Now Francisco admitted that he, too, had experienced certain problems with that minute and embarked on a story of his work in South Africa, work which was both exciting and uplifting, but in essence had the character of a Sisyphean task. From time to time something would work. He told me of the personalities he had helped in his child welfare work – pure Hans Christian Andersen stories. Warm feelings of joy surface when I hear of success against almost impossible odds.

Francisco asked me about child and youth welfare work in Denmark. I did not know what to say! Firstly, welfare work with children and young people in South Africa and Denmark does not bear comparison, as the two contexts simply are worlds apart. Secondly, it serves no purpose to recount those de luxe problems we experience in little Denmark where we, statistically, in the past 25 years, have placed between 12 and 14 thousand children in care.

If you are to make any comparison, at all, you could begin with the universal trauma and pain of being removed from your family. But even this may end up as a fishing expedition where we will never know what we land in our net and what disappears through the mesh etc. We only have language to relate the trauma and the pain. We do not know if we understand the trauma and the pain.

Statistics and figures are useless in this context. But we could try to imagine exactly what it might mean to be taken away from that which means everything to a child: its family. Francisco agreed. I told him that I had been greatly impressed to read Desmond Tutu’s book No Future Without Forgiveness, because Tutu very accurately indicates the single solution to the problem which has been characterised by so much inhumanity towards the blacks (1) in South Africa.

Francisco was more restrained in his opinion of Tutu. “He was never there!” he said and admitted that, naturally, he had much respect for Tutu, but that it was a common sentiment among the blacks that Tutu merely watched from his protected windows in his bishop’s palace. He never participated in the demonstrations. The great saviour, to the blacks, is undoubtedly Nelson Mandela.

When the twentieth century did not turn out to be the Century of the Child (2)what did it turn out to be? Maybe Henrik Jensen (3) is right when he calls it the Century of the Victim. He would not be the first to point out that the western culture is a culture of victims.

With direct reference to Abraham who displays both the will and the courage to sacrifice his son, Isaac, we have adopted this image that we, in our highly-developed western culture have sacrificed the next generation. In war, as cannon fodder or in refugee or concentration camps, and in the holy name of development we have experimented in so-called educational institutions - with children as victims. Myths about child sacrifice are also known from fairy tales such as Hansel and Gretel, and The Pied Piper of Hamelin where the point is clear : if you cheat with the scales, there will be a terrible revenge.

I do not know what to think of the Order of Jesuits which are known to have put themselves forward as child rearers, “Give us the child’s first six years – and we will give you a man!” On the contrary, I feel more sympathy with Kipling’s words, “Give me the child’s first six years - and you may keep the rest.” Kipling thought that the most exciting years in a person’s life were the first six, because the child had not yet adopted the adult concepts of good and evil. It is interesting in this connection to make mention of Grundtvig (4), who compared the human life cycle to the four seasons. Childhood belongs in the dark and cold of winter!

In present times when it is impossible to hide anything from anybody due to the constant monitoring, you could well ask the question: was the catastrophe in Beslan an attempt to annex the neighbouring country, Chechnya – or an exclusion of the children? There is not likely to be a “true” answer – because in war, truth is the first victim, as the saying goes.

But it is extremely interesting to consider Zygmunt Baumann’s theory on inclusion and exclusion. He believes that, in our monitored, globalised society, our lives are very like those in a traditional village, the global village where everyone knows everything about everybody. Here, you cannot exclude anybody or anything. If you try, you will become the target of terrible revenge. Just as with the rat catcher in the fairy tale, Baumann uses the image of the excluded ones who return as terrorists.

Terrorists are beyond inclusion, and precisely for this reason everyone must be included who, for various reasons, does not quite fit into the modern concept. In our own small, (over)protected back yard (Denmark), all educational institutions must be all-inclusive. They must be broadly based. We will have to close down all the special educational institutions and, instead, the general educational institutions will have to include all the deviating characters as well. The special educational effort will be replaced by special educational inclusiveness. And this will take place in the area of general education – in ordinary educational institutions for children and young people.

When reading advertisements for courses, theme days and conferences, one notices a recurring theme: the inclusive Folkeskole, or the inclusive daycare institution. There are, seemingly, no limits to this inclusiveness. The teacher is expected to cope with everything.

In my view, there are limits to the all-round abilities of teachers. Maybe it is time to start considering theme days on the lack of all-round competence in teachers. If we look at the frightening examples turned up by history, it becomes quite clear that we were forced to find an education method which could cope with the odd characters – the deviants, those not fitting in. We developed social and special education as methods defining themselves along the general educational theories and ideas, but existing in an area outside the general educational sphere.

In practice, by training educational staff to work as special teachers inside the general educational institution, and as social education workers who could work both outside and inside the general educational institution. But now, the thinking is quite different. Now the Secretary for Education as well as the Secretary for Family and Consumer Affairs state that all educational institutions must accept and include absolutely everybody – excepting the extreme deviants. Those we can stow away in the so-called secure institutions.

I do not, after some deliberation, write secure educational institutions, because I have grave doubts that these prison-like environments should be termed educational. Similarly, it is paradoxical to imagine that mentally retarded people will be given the right to decide for themselves, just because statutes decree that they should co-decide with as much self-determination as possible, the point being that were they to decide for themselves, they would probably never accept the housing offer provided.

We remove benches from parks and bus stations, so that the rest of the ’deviants’ cannot use them to display their social needs by imbibing cheap export beer from the local discount supermarket. We give them mobile workmen’s huts parked in inconspicuous locations where we can’t see them.

But let us return to the FICE World Congress, to the conclusion which consisted of a panel discussion and a presentation of the results of a parallel conference held by young people.

The panel consisted of the following: Malay Dewanji from India, Francisco Cornelius from South Africa, Carol Kelly from the USA, Emilia Chervinskaya from Russia, Sari Laaksonen from Finland and Wolfgang Trede from Germany. Each had 5 minutes to speak about children’s situation in their home countries.

Dewanji said that, in his opinion, the biggest problem for children in India is the fact that, every year, more than 2 million children will never reach their first birthday and that every tenth child is born with a physical or a psychological handicap.

Cornelius talked about violence and AIDS being the biggest threats for children growing up in South Africa.

Kelly told us that a quarter of all children grow up in poverty in the USA. These children have no hope of education, no exam papers or certificates. No public control exists in this area. Children can look forward to a life either without work or a life with poorly paid work. These children are not heard; they have no rights. It seems that very few Americans are aware of international conventions on children’s rights.

Chervinskaya said that 23 million children below the age of 15 are at special risk. In Russia there are more than 300,000 children with no adult contact, at all – roughly 33,000 of them “live” in Moscow. She concluded her contribution with the following remark, “In Russia - any child is at risk!”

Laaksonen said simply that she found it difficult to say anything after the earlier contributions. For in her opinion, the worst threat to children growing up in Finland was “abundance and affluence”!

Trede said something similar, and finished by saying that some of the problems contributing to a social imbalance in Germany, and hence a threat to society was the fact that more than 40% of women with academic training did not wish to have children (the reason for this is anyone’s guess).

Needless to say, this kind of presentation made an impression. My thoughts went along these lines. Well, this is only the top of the iceberg. I wonder what’s happening in the world’s most populous country, China? And what about the entire African continent – and South America?

And I saw, in my mind’s eye, an advertising poster present at all the bus stops in Denmark at the moment. Two young people, partly undressed, are in a loving embrace. “We strip!” it says, and in small letters further down, something like, “We do it to focus your attention on the fact that every twelve seconds somewhere in the world, a child dies as a result of polluted water!”

The result of the parallel conference was a fine achievement. All the children were active on, behind and beside the stage. Everyone had a task. We were presented with a multimedia show which was impressive. The children (also older ones who should be called young people) had made a music video, photostats and pictures. There was even a rap performance on stage, in many different languages. The children’s concluding part was the big – and very thought-provoking rhetorical question, “Who can be experts on children?” Answer, “Only children!”

This was the concluding remark of the actual conference. Finally, we were presented with a video from Slovenia. It was produced by FICE´s South East Europe Section and was an invitation to the next FICE World Congress in Sarajevo in 2006 (www.fice-congress2006.org).

It would have been apt to conclude this small essay about the Glasgow Congress by referring to the fact that, despite the sad conditions almost all children experience in growing up, be it poverty or affluence, we still have hope left. Quoting a French philosopher, “However false hope may turn out to be, it still eases our journey through life”.

The Congress theme in Sarajevo is: how to set up positive prospects for children even if childhood has been hard. There is, naturally, a good reason for this in former Yugoslavia. Here in particular, FICE has had, and still has, a great role to play in the work with creating good conditions for children to grow up in.

References

Bauman, Z: An unfinished adventure Polity, London, 2004
Jensen, H: Ofrets Aarhundre Samleren, Copenhagen, 1998
Tutu, D: No future without forgiveness Gyldendal, Copenhagen, 2001

www.fice-inter.org
www.fice-europe.org
www.fice-dk.

Søren Hegstrup is President of FICE-Denmark and FICE-Europe, and Vice President of FICE-International. He can be contacted at : s@hegstrup.dk .

(1)To be fair, I should emphasise that it was not I who called the South Africans blacks. Francisco did (with a certain amount of pride).
(2)As predicted by the Swedish popular philosopher, Ellen Key.
(3)Jensen, H (1947-), Danish historian.
(4)Grundtvig, NFS (1783-1872), Danish theologian and pedagogue