2024 biennial opening speech

Convergence(s) of New Education was founded in 2021, to mark the centenary of the first founding congress of the International League for New Education. After two initial meetings in 2017 and 2019 in Poitiers, which preceded this centenary, we realised that we needed to come together to defend, promote and develop New Education in our societies.

After the third Biennial in Brussels in 2022, we set up this collective. Other associations have joined the the original 8 movements. So here we are again, coming together for a 4th Biennial, with what brings us together, but also with our differences. That's why we've invited all the New Education movements that make up Convergence(s) to make a contribution.

Today, if we are to build on the writings, thoughts, tools and exchanges that have shaped New Education for over a century, we must constantly reinvent ourselves. In 2022, in order to create an updated common foundation, we co-wrote the Manifesto ‘The world we want, the values we defend’. This manifesto has been re-edited for this Biennial. Now, two years later, we realise that while this is a valuable foundation, we have to face up to a world that is not going exactly in the direction we would like it to go.

 

First of all, we said to ourselves that we needed to take a look at the state of this world, which, let's face it, is not going very well, especially as we started thinking about this opening speech at the end of June, the day after the European elections, in which the far right gained significant ground. During the various meetings of the Convergence(s) steering committee, our reflections led us to come up with 5 areas of work for this Biennial. Because even if we are not a political movement, we are a movement whose objectives include taking educational positions that are necessarily ‘political’ in nature, so that we can have an impact on the world. These areas of work will run through the various discussions and debates over the 4 days, enabling us to build our positions together.

First of all, there is the state of the planet and climate change. Some young people are giving us hope by taking innovative action. But the inaction of governments and the pressure of big business lobbies mean that nothing is being done on a global scale to combat the degradation of our environment and ensure a liveable planet. This brings us to our first priority, which is to consider a new approach to education in the face of this ecological challenge.

All over the world, we are worried by the election results in many countries. We are faced with the rise of the extreme right and reactionary ideas. Some young people are giving us hope by reflecting on and creating new tools to combat domination (sexism, racism, anti-Semitism, validism, homophobia, transphobia, etc.). But we find ourselves powerless in the face of genocide, increasingly confronted with the going down of girls' and women's rights, discrimination and even the criminalisation of LGBTQIA+ people, political and trade union repression, the denial of democracy, etc. This led us to the second area of work, which is to reflect on the New Education in the face of increasingly authoritarian governments.

The various liberal policies and the undermining of public services that we are seeing in several countries are leading to an increase in poverty. For more than a century, since the start of the new education system, the democratisation of schools has enabled many generations to have access to a ‘more complete’ education. But the educational pathways of pupils are still not dissociated from the socio-economic context in which they live. The emancipatory education that we advocate is not at what many governments want, which all too often reduce the money allocated to this sector, leading us to believe that the educational failure of part of the population is deliberate.

The issue of health, with the decline in access to healthcare, also has an impact on school failure. The lack of resources given to school medicine, social work, psychiatry and support for disabled pupils has an impact on success in school. We are delighted that progress has been made in thinking about education in a different way to that of confining disabled or sick children and young people. But inclusion remains a vain wish without the means to achieve it and, even if this varies from country to country, not much is being done to think about a truly inclusive school where all children and young people, whether able-bodied or not, have their place. This brings us to our third area of work,, New Education in the face of socially-marked failure at school.

Our fourth area of work, ties in with our third. The specialisation of streams, the selection and sorting of students, all part of a process of social reproduction, confine us and prevent us from understanding

 

a complex world, while at the same time making it easier for us to withdraw and dominate.

We are faced with institutions that want to fit children, young people and adults into moulds to best serve the dominant system, leaving very little room for diversity to be taken into account and for individuals to be actors and decision-makers. This observation also ties in with the rise of individualism to the detriment of the collective. Education therefore needs to be seen as a whole, with the various players complementing each other to enable each individual to build his or her own future. In line with its historical heritage, this education must also be seen as popular, where ‘doing things together’ leads to ‘living together’, where the individual feeds the collective and the collective feeds the individual. This leads us, as a fourth area of work, to reflect on what global education is, and what popular education is in relation to new education.

If children do not have the opportunity to play an active role in their learning and leisure activities, the same applies to education professionals. The lack of training and the creation of technicians who do the work, sometimes asking too few questions about the meaning of their work, is a reality. This ties in with the issue of the weakening of the collective to the benefit of the individual, with the emphasis on personal development as a life objective. This ‘personal development’ is flooding into public schools and so-called alternative education structures. Without getting into a debate about private and public education, which is different from one country to another, we denounce these ‘commercial’ schools, which respond to a logic of selection and promotion of ‘heirs’: parents pay a high price for their services and, in exchange, they train their children to join the ranks of economic and political leaders. We also denounce these education systems which, in some states, are left in the hands of purely private investors who are in search of their own profit and show no interest in the development and emancipation of populations through their education. Furthermore, with an international vision of education, in a context of war and even genocide, it is impossible not to think about education for peace and justice. This brings us to the final area of reflection during this Biennial, which is the question of privatisation and commercialisation, and how we can respond by putting cooperation and internationalism back at the heart of education.

Once we have criticised our governments, the influence of lobbies and the ideas of the right and extreme right, we still feel it is important to take a critical look at ourselves and identify our share of responsibility for the situation we have just described. Because if we want to take concrete action in education and training, we also need to understand the mechanisms we do or do not put in place to change what we criticise in our societies, so that we can fight more effectively.

In this sense, it is a question of showing the dead-end into which neo-liberal and productivist logics have led us, as well as its antinomy with ecological demands. It is not possible to seriously rethink our educational project without at the same time rethinking the world we want to move towards. It is only once this new ‘political project’ has been defined and shared that we will really be able to take seriously the issues of citizenship, individual and collective emancipation, participatory democracy and many other things that are now being erased by the predominance of the employability issues of a school that serves the current economic order of a society where the future promised to young people is that of a workforce that can be bent at will or recruited to prepare for their wars. It is because we are fervent defenders of critical education and because we are fighting for a different future for young people that we must take advantage of this biennial event to enrich our reflections, share our concerns, and set ourselves a battle plan that is equal to the stakes.

We can ask ourselves questions about our political, trade union and educational divisions... while we must respect our differences, we cannot afford to divide ourselves at the present time. Our differences are necessary. However, they must not be a brake on our debates, but rather an asset to help them grow and lead to a common foundation.
We can ask ourselves questions about our resistance, which is certainly insufficient, because we ourselves are caught up in a society that advocates individualism over the collective. For many reasons, and often quite simply for our own health and safety, it is sometimes easier to comply with the demands of our superiors, even if we do not agree with them.
We may question our roles as professionals in institutional abuse or our contribution, however unwitting, to selection mechanisms. Because we can't do our best, we try to do the least worst, but from less worst to less worst, we end up in situations that are less and less acceptable.
We can ask ourselves about our roles as educators who, while advocating the development of a critical mind and the emancipating value of knowledge, and a national education system that sets itself the task of building autonomous and responsible citizens, nevertheless leads too many of our former students to vote for the extreme right. What have they learnt from the years they spent with us?
We can ask ourselves about our often very unequal places in the different territories of our countries and even our planet. Whether we are in a city centre, in the countryside, in the suburbs, in a refugee camp, whether we are in Africa, America, Europe, Asia, the Indian Ocean, Oceania.... each of these places must be able to become a place of emancipation for the children and young people, for the adults who live there.
We can question the inappropriateness of some of our discourse, which is sometimes too far removed from the concerns of children and their families. Poverty is on the increase throughout the world. When we are faced with people who do not know what they will live on tomorrow, the prospect of a future is complicated to build and our utopian speeches can seem out of touch. It therefore seems necessary to combine our struggles with those of more precarious families who are demanding papers and housing to have the right to live with dignity in any country.
We can ask ourselves questions about our training courses and meetings, which are often held in isolation. For many of us, our associations and movements are experiencing a decline in the number of activists. Education and training professionals are not necessarily immune to what we stand for, but we can't convince them to take action.
We can ask ourselves questions about our sometimes too firm opposition to new technology, which distances us from the reality of children and young people. This reflection also raises the question of legitimate knowledge, which would be that of the school, and another kind of knowledge, which would come through media that we do not control and to which we are opposed, and often rightly so. But by adopting this stance, we are entering into a top-down and dominant conception of education. Our role as educators is to help children, young people and adults develop a critical and emancipatory outlook that we can nurture for ourselves as we work together.
We can ask ourselves about our difficulties in thinking of school as no longer necessarily the main place for acquiring the knowledge deemed necessary for understanding and living in the world. The importance of school in acquiring the keys to living in an increasingly complex world is not necessarily the same today. And, by the same token, on the weight we give to the intermediary bodies of civil society and the process of shared popular education that can develop there.

 

Having said all that, what should we do? First, resist!
There are, of course, many ways of doing this. Resisting means assuming our positions in the actions we take and in the vision of education and training that we defend. Resistance also means sometimes disobeying. Resisting also means creating a collective, so that we are not alone in facing our opponents. And preparing for the battles to come.
But we can't just be in opposition. We also need to regain the upper hand in this battle of ideas, by mobilising, building and opposing our project for a truly emancipatory school and society. By drawing strength and inspiration from the actions that many of us are trying to develop and by creating solidarity between us to support our real actions. 

And that's why we've come together for this Biennial. And among all the discussions we are going to have, it seems necessary to know what we really want. What global political project do we want to defend, starting each time from our point of view as educators.
While we at Convergence(s) have begun a major process of pooling our efforts, in recent years several other groups have emerged with the aim of proposing a systemic approach to the wrongs afflicting education systems and calling to be ‘rethought’, ‘rebuilt’ and ‘refounded’ on bases close to the values, principles and approaches defended by the Education nouvelle movement. Wouldn't it be in our interest to get closer to these Collectives, so that we can learn from each other's contributions and gain a wider audience among those working in the field and the public authorities? One way of doing this is by linking up and networking initiatives at local, national and international level. This is what we are trying to achieve with Convergence(s), and again at this Biennial.
From the point of view of transforming education and training, we need to find a dynamic link between the broadest possible convergence, on a national and international scale, of ideas for change in the field of education, on the one hand, and, on the other, the achievements which, on a local scale, bring about change on the ground and make it tangible thanks to the creativity and inventiveness of all the players in a given area?
To be able to defend our ideas, we need to make ourselves heard, by publishing and communicating together in a more uniform way to infuse our ideas, principles and positions for an educational revolution. So it's important to think about these communication tools. While we have mentioned our sometimes over-critical view of new technologies, we need to think about the place that new generations give them and how they can be used to influence the world.

It also seems important to pool our tools. They must complement each other in the interests of global, popular and new education. They must enable children, young people and adults, but also us as professionals, to analyse the world around us, find out about the most effective alternatives and adopt them in the long term, and create the tools to implement them.
This means questioning what we mean by alternatives: are they to be found outside society, or are they present in the various institutions? What role can these alternatives play in the decision-making process, to ensure that governments guarantee that education and training remain a common good and a universal right, accessible to everyone outside the school system, regardless of their socio-economic capabilities?
This political project to update and defend the New Education in order to change our societies must, in its main objective of emancipation, take into account what challenges the established powers and their impact on the environment and on the relationships of domination between individuals and groups of individuals. This Biennial does not situate itself outside this society. These relations of domination (sexist, racist, glottophobic, validist, homophobic, transphobic, etc.) must also be questioned in our discussions and behaviour amongst ourselves, during the formal workshops and debates, but also during informal times.

This Biennial brings together members of all our movements. It is not an open market where each of us is there to ‘sell’ our practices. It's about getting together over 4 days to debate, exchange ideas, compare our different points of view, try to enrich and even build our practices together, so that we can bring out what brings us together and what makes us a collective converging towards a common goal, which is resistance through and for the New Education, in order to make it our project for society.

 

Having said all that, we wish you plenty of exchanges, work, meetings and reflections during these 4 days of the Biennial.