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ADDRESS BY PRESIDENT ROBINSON TO THE 75TH ANNIVERSARY FORUM OF THE INSTITUTE OF INTL EDUCATION, NY

ADDRESS BY PRESIDENT ROBINSON TO THE 75TH ANNIVERSARY FORUM OF THE INSTITUTE OF INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION, NEW YORK, ON 27 OCTOBER

It is appropriate today to celebrate the achievements of the Institute of International Education, as it stands right at the edge of a new and challenging century, which will affect every aspect of its programme of commitment.  I certainly want to be part of that celebration.  And yet I regret, especially since I have been a student  myself outside Ireland, that the language for doing this is, by and large, so solemn.

After all, the method of that exchange over the years has been so spirited, so excited, full of letters falling on doormats and whoops of joy from young people, and travel plans and sleepless nights, that these should also be kept in mind today.  When the American poet Sylvia Plath won the Fulbright which would take her to Cambridge, right into the heart of British poetry, thereby starting a dialogue between the two poetries which is influential to this day, her response was downright and delighted and I imagine fairly typical.  When she rang her mother to inform her that she had got the Fulbright, she was too ill to come to the phone.  "Tell my mother", said the excited Sylvia Plath, "that my news will help her more than anything else could".

And so this Forum is full of the shadows and spirits of those excited young people, packing their cases, looking at strange currency, practising another language perhaps, getting ready to open their minds and adapt their views and fill their memories with sights and sounds which would change their future lives.  I can sympathise with this because, when I graduated from Trinity College in Dublin, I went to Harvard.  That short distance opened an enormous span in my life of new insights, of a sense of another society, of new friends and different customs.  And to this day, right up to my holding of this office, I would find it hard to say how much I owe to that experience.

But the effects of educational exchanges are so vast and so mysterious that they are hard to quantify in any language, whether solemn or celebratory.  The profound changes which are wrought in a young person's intelligence when they combine a change of environment with a learning process, are almost impossible to measure.  This Institute of International Education has continued its marvellous programme over 75 years using one flawless and changeless asset:  the openness and generosity and creative interest of young minds.  New friendships.  New hopes.  New perceptions of the world.  These are the products of those minds.

But if this is a changeless asset, the circumstances surrounding it are not changeless.  Indeed I know that you yourselves are deeply concerned about the pace and intensity of the changes which are facing you.  After all, when this Institute began in 1919, the idea of educational exchange must have seemed daring and hazardous to the parents of  young people who themselves had never stirred beyond one dear horizon, or out of one familiar town.  To see their sons and daughters packing and getting ready to leave for Paris and London and Rome, ready to study art and philosophy and history, thousands of miles away from where they were born - that must have been an astonishing and unsettling sight to those who first saw it.  

But now something is shifting again.  An enormous change is coming to all of us, which must revolutionise our ideas of both education and exchange.  Even as I speak today about distance and enlightenment, there is another distance which is adding to itself every hour in a mysterious way.  Our name for  it at the moment is cyberspace.  But it may not be the right name.  Indeed we have not found a name for a huge and mythic expanse which opened up slowly and yet suddenly, where packets of information are switched and retrieved, retrieved and passed on, are returned and added to.  Where a student in Dublin can access a computer and within a few minutes download a file from the Center of Innovative Computer Science at Indiana.  Where vast amounts of information and expertise, and reference and knowledge, are seething in a darkness we need to define and control.

We need to define this new treasure before our children become more fascinated with the method of acquiring knowledge than with the knowledge they acquire.  And we need to be able to persuade them that knowledge is not so much power as responsibility.  At the moment we stand at the very edge of confusion.  In the Gutenberg project which  is available on the Internet there are hundreds of electronic books.  On our library shelves there are thousands upon thousands of other books.  How do we relate the real book to their virtual book?  How do we relate the act of  reading to the act of virtual reading?  How can we create between these two worlds - the old and the new - enough harmony so that young people can tolerate the fracture between them?  In the past you encouraged young people to travel a distance, and bring their knowledge back.  Now we have to encourage them to understand better that distance they need not travel:  out in cyberspace.   And still somehow persuade them that the growth of an outward technology can be an addition, but never a substitute for an inner life.

If we are to do any of these things then I think we have to establish a swift and sympathetic dialogue with these new changes.   I find it moving and unnerving that we are living - I have no doubt of this - on the edge of a change which is as profound as that begun when Caxton made popular the printing press.  And therefore educational exchange cannot any longer be construed as a suitcase, or a destination, or a subject matter which must be learned and retained.  It must also mean, I feel, an education in exchange:  in exchanging one set of variables and values for another, so that the old world, with all its values and treasures, can speak confidently to this new world, with its immense power.

Just a few years ago, the ending of the Cold War marked the end of a period of stability in international relations.  It was not a stability to which many of us would wish to return, marked as it was by frequently sterile ideological debates, and by forms of competition and rivalry in international affairs which had many negative aspects. 

However, as the old barriers come down, new ones are being erected - not necessarily along the lines of the old ones, but along social, political and ethnic fault-lines whose very existence had been camouflaged for decades.  The concepts of global interdependence and mutual respect are all too often being threatened by tidal waves of mutual antagonism and fear.  The threat - and the opportunity - was expressed succinctly by Elias Canetti two decades ago: it is still a real one.

"Rulers tremble today, not, as formerly, because they are rulers, but as the equals of everybody else.  The ancient mainspring of power, the safe-guarding of the ruler at the cost of all other lives, has been broken.  Power is greater than it has ever been, but also more precarious.  Today either everyone will survive or no-one".

In the short term, at least, the instability generated by the present climate of uncertainty is reflected not only in the political and military arenas, but also in the economic and social fields.  There is the emergence of a global economy, it is true.  But this new global economy is still in many respects an inchoate, anarchic place.  It is characterised not only by a greater freedom than ever before to buy and sell, but by an unprecedented degree of mobility for human and financial capital.  This is by no means an unmixed blessing: in Dublin as well as in Detroit, factories can disappear overnight as employers chase new sources of cheap labour.  This can often have devastating consequences for regions, nations and indeed individuals struggling on the edge of viability.  Internationally, thinly-disguised trade wars simmer just beneath the surface, as regions and nations strive to extract the best possible deal from their major trading partners, and to protect what they see as their fundamental strategic interests. 

As I had opportunities to see recently, the playing field in our global village is not an even one.  Having just returned from paying State visits to Zambia, Zimbabwe and Tanzania, followed by a humanitarian visit to Rwanda and the refugee camps near Goma in Zaire, I am conscious of how different the challenges to modern leadership are in that whole region of Africa.  And I am not just referring to the areas of recent crisis.  Despite the fact that governments have followed the very steps recommended: moving to multi-party democracy, adopting structural adjustment programmes and liberalising their markets, countries find they are slipping inexorably further back because of the burden of debt to the IMF and World Bank.  So they feel compelled to reduce spending on primary education and health care, and are unable to develop, for example, the tourism potential of great natural beauty and resources.  What I have witnessed - and it worries me greatly - is a growing crisis of confidence among the leadership of those countries in their capacity to cope unless the debt burden is addressed urgently.  Seeing their situation directly through their eyes, listening to their perspective, and sensing their growing frustrations brought home to me, as perhaps nothing else could, the ever-widening gap between different parts of the world and the importance of bridging that gap.

Paradoxically, the proliferation of communications technologies provides no automatic guarantee of greater understanding.  We now have the capacity to transmit almost anything, anywhere, anytime.  As the newspaper struggles for survival, the newer electronic technologies fill the airwaves with a bewildering menu of news, entertainment, sports and comment.  But here too, underneath the glamour and the glitz, important questions remain unresolved.  Mark Twain, you will remember, reacted with honest scepticism to the news that, as a result of the invention of the telephone, Washington would now be able to talk to Seattle.  "But what", he asked (somewhat tetchily, I like to think) "will Washington say to Seattle?"  Talking, and saying something, are not always or necessarily the same thing; communication can be used to obscure as well as to reveal.

In all of this, it important to underscore the basic truth implicit in the title of your Forum and indeed in the genesis of the Institute itself: investment in human beings is - and not only in the long run - the most productive use of resources we have yet devised.  We should never allow it to be displaced by economic or technological imperatives.

Because education is one of the most traditional forms that this investment in human potential takes I would like to reflect for a moment on the its role, with specific reference to the issues you are addressing.

Education has itself moved through many different phases, and has taken - still takes - many different forms.  It can be education for survival or education for social integration - probably the two oldest forms of education we can identify.  It can be education for self-development, for economic advancement or for technological competence.  It can be education for research - or for fun.  It is formal and informal, structured and unstructured.  It takes places in schools and outside them, in homes, fields and factories and even in taverns.

No matter where or how it takes place, however, it is characterised by a deep internal tension which is at the same time the source of its energy as a human activity.  This is the tension between its ideological role as a transmitter of values, practices and customs, and its creative role as the liberator of human potential.

This is a tension, not an opposition, for people need to keep in touch with the bedrock of human cultural and social experience which they share with their fellows if they are to become truly creative.  If they are to rebel, it helps to know what they are rebelling against.  And an educational system which is doing its job properly will make a people "easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy to govern, but impossible to enslave".

Beyond the more overtly political issues with which educational policy-makers, practitioners and administrators regularly grapple, however, there are others which are more fundamental, and which relate in a very direct way to our themes.  Broadly speaking, they involve making critical choices: should we encourage conformity or foster leadership and creativity?  Are we in danger of subordinating the development of the individual to the requirements of a managerial or political elite, instead of enabling the empowerment of that individual so that she or he can play a conscious and active part in the shaping of human history?

In the two areas we are addressing today - the global economy and the technology of communications - these fundamental choices present themselves in a particularly vivid and concrete way.

In relation to the global economy, there are two perspectives in contention.  One of these perspectives is tempted to see human beings essentially as consumers, and to see the function of this economy as related to the satisfaction of these consumers' needs.  This perspective has its own inexorable logic.  This logic can lead in turn, and by a process of elision, to a state of affairs where those needs are less and less articulated by consumers themselves, and more and more determined by a general climate of consumption in which the range of possible choices has been artificially narrowed to that which can be produced more quickly, more cheaply, or more profitably.

But human beings are producers also - perhaps even first and foremost.  We produce not only the artefacts of our civilisation but also - and more importantly - the integument of society itself, the complex and shifting web of relationships, affections and emotions which binds people together in socially supportive and creative ways.

In doing this, ordinary people continually refresh and renew their own culture, their own way of being in the world.  Culture is never static, confined to textbooks, or limited to that which has been identified and labelled by anthropologists.  As Patrick Kavanagh, the Irish poet, powerfully noted:

"Culture is always something that was,

Something that pedants can measure,

Skull of bard, thigh of chief,

Depth of dried-up river.

Shall we be thus for ever?

Shall we be thus for ever?"

As Kavanagh knew, we shall not be thus for ever.  In their own varied existences, people have always implicitly recognised the permanence of change, even as they are sometimes apprehensive about its scale or its consequences.

One of the prime challenges facing education in this new age, therefore, must be to take sides in this battle of perspectives - to question the notion that we are only consumers, and to re-instate the primacy of the human producer as an intelligent, rational maker of choices rather than merely as a passive consumer of objects.  If this is accepted on a wider scale, we can work together towards the objective of preventing a market oriented economy from becoming a market dominated economy, either nationally or globally.

The other clash of perspectives, in which I would argue that education should also take sides, is in relation to the proliferation of communications technologies.  I have just noted what seems to me a danger that the globalisation of the economy will reduce people to a sort of passive consumerism.  In relation to the communication media, precisely the same danger obtains.  The more sophisticated and widespread the technology, the greater the risk that people in general will be reduced to the role simply of individual members of vast, aggregated audiences.  The technology becomes the servant, not of information, but of entertainment alone.  And even where it is also the servant of information, it echoes an agenda determined by ever smaller groups of professionals, however principled, skilful and well-meaning these may be.

But just as people are not only consumers but also producers, so also are they communicators as well as audiences.  We communicate or we die.  If we allow ourselves to be treated only as audiences we will wither on the vine.  Production; communication.  These words are the currency of a new age in which the survival of each of us and the survival of the planet are inextricably intertwined.  They are also aspects of human activity in which, as in other resource areas, there are rich and poor.

And that gap between the rich and the poor, in the economic and the information spheres, is not by any means clearly delineated by political lines on maps.  The contrasts between North and South, between First World and Third World, - which I have already emphasised - are only the more visible of those that exist: we should not allow them to obscure the endemic and deeply structured inequalities within our own societies.

The role of international education, in this context, cannot afford to be leisurely or reflective.  It needs to be urgent, pro-active, innovative, looking through and beyond the formal institutional structures to identify and empower a new generation for the future.

Many of our new leaders will undoubtedly come from countries and societies that are regarded as poor by the standards of the Western industrialised world, but I suspect that they will have more than a little to teach us about values, standards and priorities.

They will be doing this in a world in which there are no longer any real blueprints - if there ever were.  At the international level, mutual respect for cultural differences has achieved the status of a truism.  If it is to become really productive, however, it has to be harnessed to an open and generous acceptance of the fact that other cultures harbour important values and truths, and that no-one has a monopoly of wisdom.  In these circumstances, the discernment and the education of leadership - the very definition of leadership itself - is of crucial importance for all our futures.

I sense that women leaders will give a lead in this.  They will reach out to each other increasingly and in instinctive solidarity as the similarities of approaches worldwide become more evident.  Here I include also the broad spectrum of women giving leadership in promoting self-help groups and networks, in providing access to credit facilities and legal expertise and in harnessing the energies to promote "bottom up" rural and urban regeneration.  Indeed, a significant impact of the Beijing World Conference next year may be to accelerate this process of linkages between women leaders at all levels.

In all of this, international education will, in particular, strive to identify and foster a new paradigm of leadership, one in which two of your Institute's most central objectives - the institutionalisation of democracy and the building of civil society - are seen as essentially a co-operative endeavour rather than as a top-down activity.

Democracy itself, as a term, has been unduly restricted to the political and parliamentary processes.  Our new generation of leaders will, as a major priority, have to elaborate creative new forms of participation and involvement, by people at every level of society, in the power structures and institutions which shape their lives.

I do not, however, want to make it sound as if the future is full only of dangers, seen and unseen.  It is also full of enormous hope and opportunity.  Under the blackened devastation of famine and war in Africa, the green shoots of the human spirit are fighting their way to the surface.  In the turmoil and insecurity of parts of Eastern Europe, there is an increasing desire, not to look to the West for instant solutions, but to fashion a new and fairer society out of the raw material immediately to hand - the human experience of their own people.  Even in our own complex and highly industrialised societies, there is a growing recognition that material wealth is essentially a means to an end, rather than an end in itself.

What that end - that objective - is will be determined by the new generation of leaders of which I have spoken.  There can be no better investment for the future than your investment in their potential, in their vision and in their energy.