Letter to Nordic countries, 1999

Vaiva Vėbraitė
Vice-minister of Education and Science
Republic of Lithuania

March 16, 1999

Trends and issues in non-formal education, the culture of the school

A very famous American once said "Ask not what your country can do for you. Rather, ask what you can do for your country.” In Lithuania’s development as a reborn Baltic democracy I have observed a swinging pendulum - first a commitment to build and serve an independent state as free people, then a disillusionment at the lack of targeted infrastructures and centralised support for citizen actions. I would myself like to know - where should the balance lie and where does it fall in reality in various countries? Where do our responsibilities as citizens lie, what must we do for our country? And what should our country do for us, what guarantees should it offer our children?

When I am asked to speak of policies regarding children’s upbringing outside of the formal learning environment, there are various stock answers upon which I might rely. It’s always easiest to speak of those children who seek out an enriched environment on their own, who find a suitable niche in their societal surroundings. These children are quick to respond to opportunity, are naturally curious. Teachers are delighted with such pupils and easily find common ground with them, both in school and through supplemental activities.

Accelerating changes in our society impact to a huge extent upon young people and this should be reflected in the educational activities provided them. A major problem today is that formal, academic education continues to be seen as the only essential part of education. Thus non-formal education, which is often best equipped to prepare young people to cope with social changes, is underestimated and opportunities to benefit are not fully realised.

On the one hand, Lithuania has a relatively large number of schools and special youth centres offering solely extracurricular programs for children according to their special interests or talents. They might take part in sports, dance, art or music activities, take an interest in electronics or ecology. We might view all this activity with some pride, but it has its dark side as well.

As a rule, such centres are established only in major cities. What is the rural child to do? Besides, such groups generally require a fee for participation, a fee that is beyond the reach of many families. I recently read a World Bank report on poverty in Lithuania that identified as a fallacy the frequently voiced belief that pensioners are the most impoverished social group in our society. In reality, they’re not - young families with several children are worse off.

Leaving aside issues of location and fees, many of these centres and schools open their doors to certain children only - those who have early on developed a clearly perceived talent in one area or another. But we need to consider the needs of all of our children, not solely the brightest among them. The question then arises - how do we provide all children at least some level of opportunity to develop special skills, explore new interests and arrive at a discovery of self?

One approach would be to transfer - in part - the delivery system of supervised extracurricular activities to an institution close to every child, to the neighbourhood school. At this time there are remnants of a broadly organised system that has undergone genteel decay during the years of independence. There were two dramatic enough reasons why: one, that school clubs were once associated in people’s minds with the dreadfully deformed system of political indoctrination engineered via the young Pioneers. The second reason that school clubs are threatened with extinction is equally simple and currently more devastating. We can’t afford them, or rather our fiscal policies don’t encourage them effectively.

At this time, there are some schools that offer extended day sessions where children can prepare homework, play and spend time at activities suited to them. Most such groups are oriented toward the needs of elementary school students. But there are plenty of organisational problems. First of all, that of teacher salaries, for our teachers are paid not as professionals with full-time jobs and monthly wages, but per number of hours taught weekly. For this reason, municipalities already spending 50-60% of their budgets on the maintenance of the basic educational process and the upkeep of extremely poorly insulated school buildings can’t afford the additional services of after-hours teachers. Another problem is the overcrowding of schools. Many schools work in two and sometimes three shifts. In these cases there really can’t be much discussion of extended day groups or other after-school activities, at least within the school facilities.

There are special non-school centres called day centres that are supported by a few municipalities and one charitable foundation that I know of. Still, this approach, oriented towards the needs of children with social problems or children from dysfunctional families runs into other difficulties. The maintenance of separate establishments is particularly expensive. This is a problem endemic to many countries, I imagine - different people and a number of institutions try to solve a particular problem, but rather than co-operating towards the same end, they end up competing with each other for scarce resources.

I think that the simple solution would be for the best, and we have put forth this simple solution, which is not so simple to implement, in a proposal to our government that we also seek outside support for. The proposal focuses on the new idea of open schools - schools that create a safe and creative haven for children with varied needs and allow the varied needs of children to be met under one roof. In a society as fragmented as ours, this is a radical idea, for it will require the concerted efforts of several ministries to accomplish. The idea is focused on educational, medical, social and cultural needs. We would like the school to become a cultural lodestone for its community. In fact, we often declare that it is already, but this is almost always declarative, rather than actual, reality. Lithuania needs its schools to be carriers of local, national and multicultural values, we need our schools to become forums for cultural developments and debate. This requires more than enthusiasm, We need expertise and we need the funding, at least at a minimal level, to seed innovative projects.

A current focus of our attention (unfortunately, a focus that is to some degree engendered by threatened status) - are school libraries. In a few schools, libraries are actively evolving towards a new functionality - information centres, pedagogic partners for pupils and teachers, centres for cultural programs as well. Just as often, poorly equipped, poorly maintained and barely functioning school libraries are being shut down entirely, merged with municipal village libraries and functioning at best as stockrooms of old textbooks. Our school libraries desperately need teaching equipment, literature, reading rooms - usually there are none - where children would be welcomed to do lessons or explore books. The ministry has a program of library modernisation, which is to be submitted for funding.

This program is an integral part of three major programs that we hope will be funded beginning in the year 2000. Each of the three bears upon the topic we are discussing today. I would like to at least name them. These are : “The modernisation of the educational process”, “The assurance of required social and pedagogic conditions for learning”, and “Support for talented and gifted children”. These three programs taken together, if implemented, will create a solid foundation for education in the next century.

Meanwhile, the projects supported in the past several years by the Council of Ministers of Nordic Countries have been an incredible catalyst for change in our schools. I have closely followed the project called “School leadership in a democratic society”. The participants of one particularly successful ongoing series of seminars were the directors of all of the municipal school departments throughout the country. If we wish to effect change in the school culture, in the way pupils and their teachers interact, we need to have a foundation for change in organisational structure, something solid under our feet, so we don’t end up walking on the clouds, a dangerous activity. One outcome of the seminars was an alliance forged between directors, another the new partnership grounded in a climate of trust between the directors and the Ministry itself.

A separate project of a somewhat different nature was focused on curriculum change. This project allowed for greater participation of grass root activists. Throughout this three year curriculum development project we watched the thirty participating schools grow as educators of their pupils, but also as a network of innovators of institutional change, testifying to a particular inner culture, as bastions of conscious citizenship at the local level.

Lithuanian schools now have a new internal structure: school councils. Some schools pay lip service to a paper council, others have bought into the concept of a democratic model of limited self-governance. Here young children play at games requiring democratic models of choice, later more serious forms of political organisation become accessible to students, parents and teachers.

The most difficult topic to touch on today is the situation of those children who are lost to us. Either they have never crossed the threshold of a school, or they have dropped out. Frankly, we don’t know how many there are. According to one estimation, it would take about $500,000, and such funding is not available. We have a glitch in the system, a seven-year gap during which children didn’t receive identity codes at birth, and now it is simply impossible to trace where they are.

Adolescent crime is on the rise. Many of the children caught up - and all of them are victims - are lost to the school system, while the remainder may not be lost to the system, but they’re lost in it. It’s not enough to weep over the children in the streets, we need to take a hard look at the children in the schools, since the worthy activity of returning children to the classroom is a matter of undoing damage that were better not done in the first place. This means re-evaluating our curriculum with a realistic view of children’s capabilities and it means providing a physically and emotionally safe environment. Incidentally, the institution of a job position called social educator is anticipated in many schools, but funding has not become available as yet. We hope to spur disbursement of the needed money to allow initial placement in some schools as of Sept. 1st.

While we consider the Gordian knot of challenges facing us, we can identify their source easily enough - the whirlwind of social change that surrounds us and demands our response. Not so long ago, societies believed that children were simply smaller, weaker, inexperienced adults. Our perception of children and childhood has changed on a very deep level. Children are essentially different. Different rules of ethical conduct apply, rules demanding particular nurturing.

Children cannot be held accountable for decisions that are inappropriate for the estate of childhood - all the more, we bear the responsibility for preparing children well able to choose for themselves in those areas of life where individual choice is a part of growth onto adulthood. So our schools must ask: How do we help children develop decision-making skills?

I think that life in Lithuania, a country in transition to a full-fledged Western democracy, grants us a unique perspective. For many long years Lithuania experienced an extremely regimented social structure. Even for adults - a sense of individual responsibility, of adequacy in critical decision-making, of selfhood, was suppressed. All the more so for children.

Lithuania has undergone a joyful political and social revolution.

What next? We rejected for all time Soviet structures upon our individual and common culture, but we need to rediscover our own authentic rules of common behaviour. Simply put, culture. We need to rediscover those boundaries of traditional behaviour that protect our neighbours and our selves, that protect our children and yet allows us to reward and rejoice in self-expression. During 50 years of occupation, many of us have lost touch with our own authentic values. Our children can’t simply choose to follow in their parent’s footsteps. Those choices are gone in Lithuania. Our children are compelled to build a new society.

And they must do so as individuals in a world where they experience a kaleidoscope of impulses through the mass-media. They are compelled to discover and orient their own moral compasses, for we have no century of democracy and humanism as a general backdrop.

This is where education comes in. We can and do institute the infrastructures of a civic society based upon Western experience, but we must depend upon our schools to breathe life, to breathe content into formal models of decision-making.

Here I run into a dilemma. Our school programs are newly constructed and speak to building idealism, civic-mindedness and tolerance. But children leave their school building for the streets where frequently, regrettably, cynicism, violence and abuse lie in wait. There is a gap between what we speak of in school and what is street reality. Children faced with this gap understandably turn bitter, scornful. Or despairing. Youth suicide is sharply on the rise.

I think it unfair to create ivory towers in classrooms, to teach “civic society as a subject” that asserts the rights and influence of each citizen and then send children into a dangerous world where they have few rights and virtually no influence. So - we need to connect the worlds we live in, to bridge the gap, so that our schools are not self-serving, are not academic ivory towers, but prepare our children for hard choices, for hard work, give them the skills to change what is false, what is wrong. Not all of our schools see this as a primary task, or even as a task at all.

I would like to ask my colleagues in the Nordic countries whether you have solved this problem. And how?