The University Challenges for the new Century
Rodrigo Carazo Odio
It is beautiful to live in the challenge to make us conscience that any human improvement is based in the knowledge of progress. The future is no other thing than a projection of the present and the changes we live, are the human knowledge effort.
The rapid technological development and the deep changes that are affecting the human and social behavior, its motives and aspirations, have made the beginning of the third millennium faster. The world changes its economic center, projecting it towards the East.
Like in centuries before when the economic center moved from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, Spain, England, today the center is moving towards the Pacific Ocean.
The progress that I am talking about is very dynamic, and its happening at the same time that the economic center is falling and so the politicians who led the world in past times.
Therefore, the far East is less far and its becoming more central.
Technology changes the human activities in a constant manner, the work can not be considered as an only effort made by humans, and by animals, in general, but also is accomplished by machines, robots, that make it every day easier to the human physical effort needed to produce goods and services. The technological goals mention before and the progressive freedom of the human physical progress, had made more important and improve the ability of the human intelligence.
The progress of the process that I am talking about has been such that the societies have been pushed rapidly, and every day the time available has been reduced also is not training for practical applications for every day technological development.
As vivid reality, it is very difficult to gasp the destruction of the planet made just to satisfied the material requirements, that is why our environment suffers today, and as is well know, the abuse and destruction, postpone the cultural development and everything that is related with the spirituality and the beauty of the art and love.
In the last three decades, the humanity has experience more material changes than all the ones occurred since the human being appeared. The already lack of surprise due to technological improvements, it is not capable to pay the attention that is required to the great development that combine the values lived in the past, with the ones that are generated daily in this changing world.
The past as today, is a gathering culture. I trust man to make the right shift towards education, so the next century and millennium, be the stage of a new culture created by an inspired humanity towards excellency.
The education should aim towards the poverty solution, the justice accomplishment and with this, the peace.
Never before the man has had the technological advances like today, that let him change the whole world in a permanent global classroom.
Today, the independence ask for harmony among cities and countries so, as in this human stage as in the community the peace will be possible.
We should be prepare to welcome the new millennium with a positive and creative spirit with our conscience that make us be up-dated in knowledge, but without forgetting positive references that make the productive values of the past, and the people always analyzing, up-dating and knowing before hand that the live is a constant process.
The growing interdependency among cities and countries demands effective and skillful responses to the urgent necessities to the fast changes that the modern society is experimenting. University education its called to produce and incentive such answers. Our towns are so dependent in economy and technology, also a lot of social changes and foreign political decisions, demand priority attention in three great fields that to the best of my knowledge they should be taking care parallel to and working one with another. What I am talking about are the changes made in the high concentrations of wealth in a few countries and inside our nations in a few hands, the advance technology as the urgent national identity statement.
It is essential that every student get the basic education that allows him to be conscience of the culture which is part of it. We are a result of a human process and with deep roots in the Greco-Roman culture, we have used the feeling from our pre-Colombian and Spanish ancestor’s traditions, spiritual values and moral, its literature and art. We have rooted this culture indo-iberican through our language and our town has lived the effects of the great thinkers of the west, all Europe, and have made our America a common vocation in Latin-America.
Our culture is inspired in the Christian values, in the great transformations occurred in the Renaissance and in a combination of the politic and social thought of the modern Europe. The lecture of the Bible, Homer, Plato, Aristotle’s, Dante, Shakespeare, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Tocqueville, Dickens, Dostoyewski, Marx, Tolstoi, Mann, Lincoln, Gandhi, Martin L. King, Octavio Paz, among others will acknowledge the universal culture required so that this training may also be a cultured man.
I defend cultured man and trained so he can be capable to think square and reliable, to create, starting from what it was inherited to him and not just from a casual chance.
A man that made contact with great feelings through the time is the cultured man who will be able to absorb even though its specialization lacks him of a global vision that every graduated should get.
We should recognize that is everybody’s fault to let the university education be pressed by the "necessities of the market" and forget about its fundamental responsibility to forge the man.
I am not telling to give the student a cultural mold, but to give him a humanistic study through its university education either short or long in a way that he acquired a solid knowledge of a firm characteristic.
I suggest that the culture can be managed by capable teachers, that are convinced of the importance about what they teach, but with enough responsibility so they will not use the teaching for ideologist thoughts, to make the student think about it for himself and make his own decisions. The teacher in relation with the origins of different elements about what we are, should understand that its roll is to guide and not to be a "know it all" teacher that is very common, unfortunately because they assume that they are very smart they should be teachers instead of something else.
Everything we have mention is about our language, and its learning so the student could communicate in its mother tongue. This is not to train to do only one job but to make men capable for social development.
The education should make the human being conscience that is capable to make direct, permanent and effective modernization. It should make a man sure about what he does so he can change and make his own decisions and to follow its own actions to make it more responsible about the results of what he does. From a systematic point of view we should promote a permanent renovation about the education system so the academic excellency be the one first along with the moral and culture of the person. We should try to get independent and cultured people, prepared to live in society with a deep and critic sense, ready for changes, responsibilities, humanitarians and scientific, to be able to see what is happening in it’s nation destiny. It is necessary to know that the education, as an instrument of human promotion, promotes faith in human dignity, as a being with intellectual faculties and moral ones almost infinite. For the cultured man and independent the paternalism always will be the negotiation of the dignity of the human being, when is made as a helping object and is no a subject in realizing about himself.
How can there be peace if there is no truth in the international spirit about justice in recognizing about what is the men worth?. How could there be tolerance an comfort? and how education is good for us if it does not teach to understand that as long as we are under somebody else interest, we will never be able to be free or look for understanding so we can over come the problems in every poor country.
It is not possible that the justice be in a world where all the decisions related with the well being of the nations and human being are taken by military and economic centers of the planet. Also is not possible to pretend that the peace can be accomplish if the man and the countries can not communicate among themselves. When the thoughts are manipulated and the actions by the news are managed by related interests with power centers. How to begin our effort because the tolerance be a way to live for man and the countries, if we do not have tolerance with our criteria and our points of view or actions are manipulated.
The teacher has to educate himself so he can teach others. In an interdependently world like this, the one we are so lucky to live in, the education of the new generations should be of a wide criteria that allow us the human beings a positive interrelationship, appropriated to a world that is every time more global. More over the responsibility of education corresponds to all members of the community beginning by its governors, educate for the justice and peace.
We live in a world in which the peace is link to the imperial power and in which the most powerful governors still go by the old Latin say "si vis pacem para bellum" ( if you want peace be prepared for war) pretending a peace based in weapons and in consequence the terror. For example, Costa Rica a small nation in the weapon deactivation, it could not be based for the presence of international organisms, but had to be back up with an attitude in reflection about peace. We think that the deactivation is essential for political decisions in which will be possible only when the world pressure be so great that the politicians and militaries can not be opposed to it. This world force will only be possible by the education means and the communications an instrument, that is out of a great world effort, that is beginning in each human being, that reflects in its own home and in the school and the community where this will be possible, one more time by the education and communication means to the world.
It is crucial to generalize that in our times the weapons do not give security, the only triumph is the one out of non violent ways.
The peace that we should have in mind is the harmony in every human with each other and its human mean and physic, with the dialog between cultures backing it up with the help among countries. The peace that is worth to make an effort without rest, is the one that beside of being simple things be an spiritual disposition, a tendency, a vocation to built something that should be permanent and recommended , replanted because human nature is complex and has a dose of aggressiveness that could be transform in hostility.
The necessity of the education make the human abandon the idea of its culture, its ideology, thoughts, could be implanted by violent means, by force, political power, military or for money. I have repeated a basic group of ideas that refer to the education from the information responsibility to form humans, you do not love what you have not met and this is the result necessary so the human intelligence inform the will so it can get to all human beings form the view point of well-being. The peace as freedom is not free or spontaneous, but an object of conquer.
The university of the new millennium has the responsibility to train the human so he will be cultured and social, able to manage robots without the risk of becoming one of them.
Last update: Agosto'98