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European Values and Higher Education: An Attempt at a Research-Centred Strategic Planning for Change

The presentation addresses the role of higher education in promoting human rights, diversity and citizenship as an essential part of the European integration processes. The main argument is that European visions, policies and practices should be brought closely together through a research-centred strategic planning for educational change if European values are to be fully integrated into educational processes. Such approach may contribute to the identification of assets and obstacles at institutional level, and, thus, help narrowing the compliance gap between policy and practice which has recently been documented in all European countries in reference to learning democratic citizenship in pre-tertiary education. The existence of such a gap makes the promotion of human rights, diversity and citizenship through higher education extremely vulnerable. There has been no agreement among the stakeholders on what concepts should be thought/learned and how in predominantly disciplinary-bounded and compartmentalised higher education systems that are now expected to contribute significantly to economic growth and social cohesion. How these two interests are going to be balanced in education and whether education may contribute at all to social cohesion in the context of, in the one hand, the strengthening of pluralism and, in the other hand, the rapidly growing market demands, remains to be seen. The promotion of European dimension and active citizenship in the context of the Lisbon strategy need more clarification, especially in relation to European citizenship and European identity, to become more attractive to higher education policy-makers and practitioners. The experience accumulated in the project on University Curriculum for Human Rights and Democratic Citizenship that has been carried out at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Zagreb since 2004 demonstrates that the promotion of human rights, diversity and democracy at this level depends on the quality of strategic planning based on a wide-range of empirical data, interdisciplinary curriculum development and a comprehensive system of evaluation and quality assurance.

European values; European dimension; European citizenship; education policy; research-based strategic planning; quality indicators; educational priorities; politisation of education

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