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E.M. Malitikov, Chairman of the Interstate Committee for Knowledge Dissemination and Adult Education, President of the International Association “Znanie”
SUPRANATIONAL FACTORS OF COMMONWEALTH DEVELOPMENT AND THEIR ROLE IN SETTLEMENT OF CONTRADICTIONS ON ALL LEVELS
The Commonwealth interrupted a destructive process for 10 years. It countered it with a peaceful, civilized, diplomatic, balanced style of relations between sovereignty-hungry states.
Long live the commonwealth!
But it is not easy, even impossible, to cope with the mudslide without costs, losses, and erroneous risks. But even here, objective statistics confirm that the CIS has a positive balance in relation to the results that would have been possible without its appearance on the geopolitical map of the world.
The CIS has responded to the challenge of time, has given the opportunity to reflect on the turbulent processes, and even to turn some of them into a laminar flow.
Everyone had time to enjoy independence, to understand that it was the only indicator of the country’s well-being.
It was a time to realize the necessity of transition to mutually beneficial options of cooperation in the fateful and common for every country processes. It was a time to calculate options for the future decades in advance and to discern joint geopolitical priorities in a globalized world. There was a time to understand that momentary interests do not correspond to a wise forward-looking strategy. Complex contradictions in various spheres of interstate relations, first of all in politics and economics, unresolved conflicts, aggressive nationalism and armed conflicts and terrorism are not characteristic only of the CIS. Not at all.
Chronicles mention more than 5.5 thousand wars in the history of mankind.
The world began to talk about the unsustainable development of life on Earth at the end of the last century.
In search of ways of recovery of the world community the United Nations adopted “Agenda 21”, in which it set a task and recommended “to the governments, international and national NGOs to seek new ways of partnership for realization of the principles of sustainable development.
The global tendency to revise the philosophy, arguments and tools of social development formed the basis of another UN decision “Sustainable Development of Mankind – Programme for the XXI Century”.
These very UN documents were the basis of the initiative of a number of CIS states and the reason for the creation in 1997. By decision of the Council of Heads of Government of the CIS Interstate Committee on Dissemination of Knowledge and Adult Education. Recently Georgia and Ukraine sent their representatives in high ranks to the Committee.
Adult education in the above-mentioned decisions of the UN puts the most important factor of social development at the heart of sustainable development. The Fifth World Conference of UNESCO in Hamburg in 1997, adopted a declaration and recommended that the governments of all states to consider adult education as a priority in public policy.
The G8 leaders in 1999 in Germany and in 2000 in Japan reaffirmed this formula in their Declaration and Communiqué.
At the Millennium Summit – General Assembly of the UN Heads of State and Government agreed on the need for public policy support for lifelong learning of adults throughout life in the era of transition to the information society.
It is important to ensure equality of all types of education before the law, the right of citizens to be educated at any age;
to create prerequisites and laws for this;
Encourage the growing network of non-state educational institutions and structures that generate extra-budgetary funds to finance educational activities.
It is necessary to help people to change their profession and place of work at the lowest cost in case of unfortunate circumstances.
The world has already done away with the idea of investing only in the economy. Investing in people, educating them, is more important to economic prosperity. Adults are mediators between the past, present and future.
Adult education is today’s most valuable resource in the face of an uncertain future.
We all need to understand new truths.
The roots of conflict in the CIS and around the world are in the inadequate understanding of what is happening. The seeds of war mature from uneven and unequal development.
The prevention of hatred is in education and knowledge.
Competence and education must be integrated into all leadership actions and policies of states in order to confront formidable problems, conflicts, contradictions at all levels.
The conclusions we must draw are:
the first building block of political stability is an informed citizenry;
the first ingredient of economic progress is a skilled worker;
the first ingredient of political justice is an enlightened society.
Education is peace-building. It is the most effective form of protecting it. Investing in education yields far greater returns than any other.
A global family of educated and learning adults will not make strategic, momentous mistakes.
Today the world is ruled by unconscious ignorance and incompetence.
At the same time in the struggle for a place “under the sun” it is not customary to admit the lack of knowledge.
This is why we fool each other and society, replacing deep objective modern retrospective knowledge with subjective experience, intuition and emotions. These are the accompanying tools of modern development.
The traditional system of education creates an attitude of sufficiency of secondary or even higher education in the young generation, which, having grown up, is immediately doomed to wither away.
Generation after generation misses its chance by neglecting deep retrospective knowledge.
We focus on superficial issues of keeping afloat and end ignominiously, each in his own country with his imperfect knowledge of the world.
It is ignorance that has made the planet weaker than the contradictions that tear it apart.
We know much about the little things, but very little about the big things. What is needed is a reassessment of values. Not at the local or even national level, but at the planetary level. We are people of the Earth, not just our own ambitious regional society.
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