“Our best universities have forgotten that the reason they exist is to make minds, not careers” writes William Deresiewicz in his article “The Disadvantages of an Elite Education“. The author makes quite some interesting points about what students learn in so called “elite universities”. Although he falls short of putting the problem in a wider social context, he nevertheless makes it clear that not everything is as perfect with these institutions as many (in Europe) want to believe.

It’s worth reading.

“Make complex ideas easy to understand” … sounds like the EU needs something like that. Although the EU started experimenting with online videos lately, it still lacks creativity and a certain “online buzz”. Most of the videos about the EU (not only EUtube!) are either pure news reports or have a political motivation. However, one of the greatest problems of the EU is that nobody understands what exactly it does and how it works (which can also explain low turnouts at European elections). Unfortunately EUtube as well as other video producers do not address these issues. Short simple online videos could help people to learn and think about the EU.  Maybe the video on US elections can turn into an inspiration to produce similar videos about the European elections or the EU decision making process …in plain 23 languages!

Of course this seems to be a politically motivated move of the Russian authorities especially since the University has close connections to the USA and EU. Moreover, the university runs a programme funded by the European Commission to improve the monitoring of Russian elections which has been criticized by Putin on a number of occasions. Read more about it here, here and here.

A petition of support is available for signing here. The least we can do, I suppose.

First, the Polish Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski used weird historic justifications for his negotiations at the EU summit last week:

We are only demanding one thing, that we get back what was taken from us. (…) If Poland had not had to live through the years of 1939-45, Poland would today be looking at the demographics of a country of 66 million.

Now, Russian President Vladimir Putin also discovered the benefits of relativism in order to justify his political agenda:

Concerning some problematic pages in our history — yes, they exist, as they do in the histories of all states. We have less than some countries. And ours are not as terrible as those of some others. (…) Yes, some pages in our history were horrible: We can think of the events beginning in 1937, and we should not forget them. But it wasn’t better in other countries — in fact, it was far more horrible.

Recently it became clear that Putin wants to use history and social science in a very ‘soviet way’. In order to reflect the apparent new strengh of Russia he wants to rewrite history to establish a new “national-patriotic ideology”. For a more detailled analysis read Pavel Felgenhauer article in the Eurasia Daily Monitor:

Putin told the teachers: “Many school books are written by people who work to get foreign grants. They dance to the polka that others have paid for. You understand? These books, regrettably, get into schools and universities.” Putin demanded new history textbooks that “make our citizens, especially the young, proud of their country” and reiterated “no one must be allowed to impose the feeling of guilt on us.”

Putin specifically noted that the history of World War II and Russia’s history after 1991 are wrongly interpreted and must be rewritten. Today Stalin has again been rehabilitated as a leader who made mistakes, but still secured victory over Nazi Germany. The 1990s — a decade when Russia was a freer state than at anytime before or since — today is demonized. The pro-Kremlin youth movement Molodaya Gvardia has announced it will be organizing marches in Yekaterinburg and other cities in support of Putin and against the regime’s critics under the slogan, “No return to the 1990s”

Putin’s personal paranoia and anti-Americanism seem to be growing and are increasingly dominating external and internal Russian politics.

Using a mobile phone is already complicated. Thank god I have staff that use the Internet for me.

(He actually made this statement during his visit at the CeBIT, the biggest computer expo in the world…)

Conclusion: The digital divide is not only a problem in the Global south, lifelong learning is unknown to its promoters and we found an explanation for all these controversial policies regarding intellectual property and other Internet related issues.

I am also wondering if similar attitudes exist in the EU institutions….?

A few weeks ago the German EU presidency proposed a common history book to be used in schools across the EU. Obviously the reactions were rather mixed. But, given the problem with (nationalized) history in general, such a book could truly help building a common identity and make people aware of different viewpoints. Moreover, it would reveal the different constructions of history .

Clearly, the existing Franco-German history textbook (that proved to be rather successful in practice) served as an example for this initiative. It might be still too optimistic to think of a common EU history book but why is it not possible to develop regional history books for a start? Or at least another book for two countries (preferably neighbors or “arch enemies”)…?

Certainly Eastern Europe would be an ideal choice for the next project, so I hope some education ministers in Eastern Europe read this article via eurotopics (btw a page I highly recommend!):

The hostilities between the countries of central Europe have arisen because the people there don’t understand the history and culture of their neighbours, writes Emese John, an MP for Hungary’s Liberals: “Our culture of remembrance is based exclusively on national history books. They bear the marks of the battles of the past thousand years and describe wars and conflicts solely from a national perspective. We live on such a tiny fragment of the world that our roots have become entwined and our branches touch each other, yet we still fail to see the common interests in our joint history – because we haven’t sought them… To discuss only matters pertaining to Hungary’s fate is narrow-minded and leads nowhere. One of the great matters of national interest today is how we can profit from this growing and increasingly fast world. It’s very important to confront the past, but to do this we need to borrow our neighbours’ glasses so we can see better.”