FUNDAEC, Colombia: Gustavo Correa
Development Schools are Teaching Self Reliance
Gustavo Correa with eulogist Dietmar Schönherr
Education is widely seen as the key to the skills which are the slumbering potential inside every human being. But education systems all over the world on the whole show two major faults: they neglect the development of the rural areas and are therefore the root for a dramatic tendency towards sprawling cities and city slums in many parts of the world. Secondly, they neglect to teach about learning, which is why so many people are not able to adapt to the changes of our time in an appropriate pace.
The founders of the so called SAT education programme in Columbia used modern knowledge and adapted it consistently to the needs of rural life. They connected it further with the traditional knowledge of the indigenous population, and the result is a radiacally novel approach to education. More than 50,0000 natives in 12 countries up to now have turned into highly effective development workers. At the same time, a future orientated culture of learning about learning has emerged, a sovereignty in lifelong learning from which Western industrial societes could yet learn one thing or another.
The international jury of the Expo 2000 in this project saw “the best educatory project of the time”, according to Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker.