Rock(’n’roll) for School and Democracy

Some people are color-blind; Brad Pitt apparently suffers from face blindness, which is why he doesn’t greet acquaintances in the street; I am blind to acronyms. It is not carelessness or snobbery but a cognitive dysfunction that prevents me from remembering any acronym longer than two letters. In my profession, this is a major handicap. A bureaucrat who struggles with acronyms is like a baker allergic to flour. I have devised a few tricks to help me avoid looking like an idiot at every single conversation or meeting, but my recognition of acronyms does not extend beyond WC.

It is not hard to imagine my enthusiasm for the idea of naming one of the joint programs of the Council of Europe and the European Union DISCO. Finally, a name that won’t immediately slip my mind. DISCO stands for Democratic and Inclusive School Culture in Operation. Of course, it is bureaucratic jargon, and in the Slovenian version the acronym DDVKŠ loses all the simplicity and playfulness of the English original, but fortunately the content makes up for this shortcoming.

The activities funded under the DISCO program are based on an excellent invention that we prepared at the Council of Europe with the help of experts from member states, including Slovenia. Of course, it too has an impossible name; once it is fully translated into Slovenian, it could be called the Reference Framework of Competences for Democratic Culture. Despite its terrible name, the thing is basically simple, understandable and, above all, very useful for its main purpose, namely supporting education for democracy and democracy in education. In Slovenian translation, it offers a wonderful opportunity for a people-friendly acronym: ROK (a common Slovenian first name) for democratic culture. When President Pahor once asked me to explain in 30 seconds what it was about, I told him that the Reference Framework for Democratic Culture is an attempt to pass on to pupils the knowledge, skills, abilities and capacity for critical thinking and judgment that we would like to see, and need, in politicians.

ROK for democratic culture imitates another great success from the Council of Europe’s education workshop, namely the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, familiar to all of you who claim in your CVs and job applications that your knowledge of foreign languages is at least C2. Just as the language framework describes what language learners need to learn in order to communicate, ROK describes the values, attitudes, skills, knowledge and critical understanding that pupils need to acquire for active democratic citizenship.

ROK includes twenty competences, each with descriptors that make it possible to transmit and assess the knowledge acquired. Among them we find the ability to argue that all public institutions must respect, protect and implement human rights; an understanding that all laws must be consistent with international human rights standards; the conviction that people holding public office must not abuse power. The descriptors also include openness to getting to know other people and their cultures, respect for people of different social and economic status, the ability to take responsibility for one’s actions, using facts as the basis for forming one’s own views, empathy, social solidarity and the ability to listen to different opinions. This random selection nicely illustrates what I wanted to convey to the President. It would be great if we could pass these competences on to pupils; even better if we managed to pass them on to politicians.

But back from ROK to DISCO. In this cycle, nine international projects were supported, among them cooperation between universities in France, Great Britain, Belgium and Italy that enabled refugees with appropriate qualifications to teach again and contribute in their field of expertise to the society that took them in. A very sensitive but important program supported LGBTI pupils, their teachers and parents in Ukraine. DISCO also supported an Austrian-Greek project on building young people’s resilience against fake news, together with a handbook on digital citizenship that we will present at the World Forum for Democracy in November.

For Slovenia, which unfortunately has not so far been represented in the DISCO program, the recommendations on addressing controversial issues in education, also a product of DISCO cooperation, would be very interesting too. At least one copy would be needed, for example, at the Kranj grammar school, and probably elsewhere too. During the project presentation, a figure was cited showing that in one of the participating countries, an EU member state, almost half of teachers want a strong leader, and one in six would even like to see democracy replaced by a military dictatorship.

Of course, in Slovenia we are not that far yet. I have a very high opinion of Slovenian teachers, their professionalism and their commitment to democratic values, but they too are not immune to what is happening in society. Objectively, it is hard to imagine successful education for democratic culture in an environment in which that culture is weakening and disappearing. That is another reason why it matters how the introduction of citizenship education in secondary schools will be received and how successful it will be.

I don’t know the details of the future curriculum, but I am confident that in many respects it will be based on the Council of Europe’s Reference Framework of Competences, not least because it was created with Slovenian expertise as well and contains experiences and approaches developed in Slovenian schools.

Even the name of the subject is important, and, if I am not mistaken, it has not yet been finalized. That is good, because the name “civic education”—without an adjective that defines citizenship in terms of values—is not the happiest and can be misleading. The reason may be that in Slovenian we use the same word for holders of a passport and for active participants in social processes. The confusion was also evident in a recent report on one of the Slovenian TV channels, in which a teacher complained that civic education was needed because pupils did not know the state symbols well. It is right that they should know them, but the aim of the subject should not be just singing the national anthem and intimate knowledge of the coat of arms and the flag. After all, North Korea has an anthem, a coat of arms and a flag too. Patriotism is an indisputably positive value that should have its place in school, but for true love of one’s homeland, pupils need to be able to ground their patriotism in values and also be critical of their homeland. Without this, there is no true patriotism, only nationalism. The future subject should give priority to understanding the state through values over defining values through the state.

The condition Pitt suffers from is known among experts as prosopagnosia. For a society that is blind to values and, instead of patriotism and openness, is based on selfishness, worship of strong leaders and fearful nationalism, there are also quite a few expert and less expert terms. But if we are looking for an acronym, I think the most appropriate would be the only one my memory has no trouble with. That is where the last one out can flush and turn off the light.