Tragedy, Farce
With French students trashing the Sorbonne and Italian students being taught via the Friends and Family plan, it can come as no surprise that
The most powerful economies of "Old Europe," including France, Britain and Germany, are struggling to keep up with a huge expansion of higher education in Asia, a new report has found.
The survey, by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, warns the members of the European Union to increase spending on schools and universities and tackle a crippling lack of social mobility within their societies, or put future economic growth in jeopardy.
"The time when Europe competed mostly with countries that offered low-skilled work at low wages has gone. ... Today, countries like China and India are starting to deliver high skills at low costs," the report said.
There is "no way" that Europe can stop rapidly developing countries from producing "wave after wave of highly skilled graduates … This is profoundly changing the rules of the game," said the study, compiled for the Lisbon Council, a Brussels-based think tank which aims to make Europe more competitive.
"France and Germany, which make up 35 per cent of the European Union's €11.6 trillion [£7.37 trillion] economy, are no longer among the world's leaders in developing knowledge and skills," the study says.
Of the world's top 20 universities, using the most widely cited index, only two - Oxford and Cambridge - are situated in Europe, the report notes.
A writer in The Observer has some more thoughts about current events in France:
We witnessing a cultural tragedy unfold. The French carry a Utopian ideal in their collective heads about what it means to be French. They are self-appointed defenders of Europe's real republican virtues of liberty, equality and fraternity. Their rightful place is as Europe's leaders, and the state, embodying an idea of France, is the nation's master puppeteer.
None of this works in 2006. The state, as all others in Europe, is circumscribed by global market forces. France is only one of 25 EU member states and the way liberty, equality and fraternity have been delivered since the 1950s has to be recast.
…French students find themselves in the same ambiguous position as their country. Their only solution to the challenge of modernity is to defend the status quo to the last, even if it is evident it is malfunctioning.
The writer concludes in this way:
Next week, European heads of state meet to advance the so-called Lisbon agenda, by which Europe committed itself to becoming the most dynamic, competitive, knowledge-based economy in the world by 2010. It is an empty farce.
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