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tions stated in the report Learning to Be:. the aim of development is the complete fulfilment of man, in all the richness of his personality, the complexity of his forms of expression and his various commitments - as individual, member of a family and of a community, citizen and producer, inventor of techniques and creative dreamer'.
This human development, which begins at birth and continues all through a person's life, is a dialectic process which is based both on selfknowledge and on relationships with other people. It also presupposes successful personal experience. As a means of personality training, education should be a highly individualized process and at the same time an interactive social experience.
In its Preamble, the report Learning to Be (1972) expressed the fear of dehumanization of the world, associated with technical progress and one of its main messages was that education should enable each person to be able to solve his own problems, make his own decisions and shoulder his own responsibilities.' Since then, all progress in different societies, particularly the staggering increase in media power, has intensified those fears and made the imperative that they underpin even more legitimate. This dehumanization may increase in the twenty-first century. Rather than educating children for a given society, the challenge will be to ensure that everyone always has the personal resources and intellectual tools needed to understand the world and behave as a fair-minded, responsible human being. More than ever before, the essential task of education seems to be to make sure that all people enjoy the freedom of thought, judgement, feeling and imagination to develop their talents and keep control of as much of their lives as they can.
This is not simply a cry for individualism. Recent experience has shown that what could appear merely as a personal defence mechanism against an alienating system or a system perceived to be hostile, also offered the best opportunity for making social progress. Personality differences, independence and personal initiative or even a task for upsetting the established order are the best guarantees of creativity and innovation. The rejection of imported high-tech models, the harnessing of traditional implied forms of knowledge and empowerment are effective factors in endogenous development. New methods have evolved from experiments at local community level. Their effectiveness in reducing violence or combating various social problems is widely recognized.
Thin:
In a highly unstable world where one of the main driving forces seems to be economic and social innovation, imagination and creativity must undoubtedly be accorded a special place. As the clearest expressions of human freedom, they may be hreatened by the establishment of a certain degree of uniformity in individ i vehaviour. The twenty-first century will need a var
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