Welcome words by Nora Sternfeld

I want to welcome all of you to this summit of non-aligned initiatives in education culture. What all of us will be trying to invent during the next four days is a particular form of gathering: a summmit. A summit is not simply a conference where people arrive and then depart without anything happening in-between. A summit in our sense is not a counter-summit either, for it is not intended to be simply reactive. What we aim to build up here is a positive context, of action rather than re-action, that stands on its own and that allows for a change of the terms of the debate between education, politics, activism and art. Together, I hope, we will be able during these days to develop such context, a context that makes other practices of education thinkable. In this sense a summit is a space for negotiation, where the outcome remains open. But what is at stake in this process of negotiation is the role of education as a practice of social change.

Education as a practice of social change will be premissed upon the follwing set of assumptions:

First, there is no such thing as neutral education. For neutrality in education will always be complicit with and consolidate the existing status quo. To develop a new vision of education therefore implies to take position.

Second, the pedagogical relation, in its traditional sense, has to be broken. It is a relation between those who supposedly are in possession of knowledge and the poor have-nots who are supposed to be educated. This relation has to be broken, because in its essence, it constitutes a relation of domination by which hierarchical structures are perpetuated.

Third, on the level of content, the existing canon of knowledge has to be changed. Existing power-relations have to be thematized and the dominant power/knowledge complex has to be put into questions through a process of unlearning and through the production of counter-knowledges.

Fourth, since the production of alternative knowledges and new educational concepts takes place within society, we will always have to reflect on and be conscious of our own position within society. That means that we have to ask: which knowledge is produced by whom, from which perspective and in whose interest? And, in addition, we will have to take into account the blind spots created by ourselves in this process.

And fifth, in order to create some consciousness regarding our own position, one has to break out of isolation. In this sense, to organize is a necessary precondition for education as a practice of social change. This summit was intended as one stept in this direction where a context for discussion and debate is created between different groups and individuals.

What does all this have to do with non-alignement? Non-aligned here refers to the possibility of cutting across and escaping the classical alternatives: The alternatives between, on the one hand, institutionalized practices and entirely non-institutionalized practices on the other; of, on the one hand, educational institutions as an apparatus of the state and, on the other, the neoliberal form of economizing learning. Of, on the one hand, the old Humboldt idea of „Bildung“ and, on the other, today’s Bologna process where learning means to accumulate the general equivalent of credit points. Referring to the historical idea of the non-aligned movement we insist on the idea of a political position that refuses the given alternatives, in the same way in which the non-aligned nations refused to subject to either the rule of NATO or the rule of the Warsaw Pact. The logic of either/or is undone by our claim of a neither/nor. In other words: We are claiming that there is an alternative to these alternatives.
In this sense non-aligned means that new possibilies are opened of what can be seen and what can be said, and that a whole range of knowledge-effects is produced.

The question of education is central to this effort. By education we do not refer to the practice of teaching in the narrow sense. What education means in our context is the wide field of themes and questions concerning knowledge production, teaching, learning and the information society. Education and knowledge production will be the topic of this summit, but at the same time it will also be our very practice while gathering here in Berlin. Together we will contribute to a new definition of what education can mean today.

Let me end by posing only a few questions with which many of us will engage during the next four days:
What do we have to learn and what do we have to unlearn in order to make all this possible?
How can we challenge the racism, classism and sexism of the existing eductional system?
How can the existing canon be shifted by alternative forms of knowledge production, and how can we, at the same time, avoid to be in turn defined by this canon?
To put it in a nutshell: How can the current conditions of knowledge and the power to define be challenged?

We hope that in this unfolding process a new context of non-alignment will be created where to change education means to change society.