One example assisting with ideological reconstruction is the establishment and activities of the Central European University (CEU) founded by George Soros. Soros has created the CEU as a means of bridging information between East and West. One of its main purposes is 'to train the academic and public servants who will lead the transition of society in Central and Eastern Europe' (O'Leary, 1992).
The University seeks to provide high-quality, internationally-recognised postgraduate education in subjects particularly neglected or distorted under the communist regimes of Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. CEU not only provides academic training but also helps students find appropriate positions in their home countries, thus strengthening the developments of open societies (CEU).
The CEU's Transition Project, affiliated with its political science department, aims at an interdisciplinary analysis of transition in Eastern and Central Europe, conducted by locally based economists, sociologists, political scientists and legal experts. Research findings are utilised in the political science department's curriculum and made accessible to the academic public through working papers, colloquia and conferences. On the basis of the research results the project makes policy recommendations to the wider public of politicians, advisers and businessmen.
The CEU's Privatisation Research Project aims to establish a new institutional framework capable of recording, analysing and disseminating knowledge about economic transition as well as translating the information into practical policy prescriptions and actual assistance. The project trains local personnel in public administration and the emerging of the institutional infrastructure of the market economy and promotes new standards of responsible corporate behaviour. A number of governments have requested the project's assistance in such areas as:
· the preparation of mass privatisation programmes (e.g. Poland, Romania)
· small business development (Russia)
· legal reform (Bulgaria)
· international assistance (Russia)
The project has received wide recognition and attracted collaboration from the United States and Western Europe, resulting in joint efforts with the World Bank, the United States Chamber of Commerce and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (CEU).
The Civic Education Project sends Western scholars to teach, motivate and assist universities in Eastern and Central Europe. This project is concerned with such issues as curriculum reform, faculty retraining, development of public education, etc. Each year the CEU provides a number of scholarships for outstanding students from the former socialist countries which enable them to undertake a course of study in the university.
[Quoted from the Internet (partially); the rest a paraphrase of information from O'Leary]
ST 2
2.2 Sensitising and Motivating the Target Group
However much the ultimate aim of this project is the re-integration of the disabled into society and the employment of the amputees, sensitising and motivating the target group was of top priority. Due to the despair each of the war-disabled had experienced they were not interested in establishing contact. Their fear of a renewed disappointment (promised prostheses were not delivered, promised foodstuffs were not distributed,...) was so great that the young war victims would not immediately have agreed to take part in the project. As a result it was necessary to meet the young handicapped in the course of a trust-building process on a partnership-like level without raising expectations or making promises. This trust-building process took about three months.
[Quoted from: HOPE '87, 'HOPE for Sarajevo - Medical Care and Educational-professional Training for War-mutilated Young People - and Young Amputees' (in co-operation with UNESCO). 1994]
ST 3
ID Rwanda UNICEF has been training social agents such as teachers, social workers and aid workers to identify basic trauma symptoms. So far 2000 social agents are on board and learning how to alleviate trauma by helping the child talk about experiences or paint a picture or play a game.
[Quoted from the Internet]
In Angola UNICEF's continuing support to education for children in difficult circumstances will take three forms: the supply of teaching-learning materials to displaced children, the rehabilitation of school structures, and the sensitisation of teachers to the problems of war-traumatised children or children in difficult circumstances in the accessible provinces.
[Quoted from: UN Consolidated Appeal for Angola, May 1993].
ST 4
Almost 300,000 children live in besieged enclaves and war zones, and 620,000 have been forced from their homes. An estimated one and a half million young people are suffering from trauma.
'Even if they are not exposed to war, they are experiencing every day a lot of stresses and traumas which are related to war,' says UNICEF psychologist Mila Kapor. 'For instance, there are many children who every day hear about atrocities and massacres; they see these on T.V.'
Their parents, confused and anxious themselves, have few resources to help the children. As Ms. Kapor says, 'Depressed parents cannot provide the so-called emotional protective shield to their children'.
But many children are getting help in dealing with the emotional trauma caused by war through the Psycho-social Programme for Traumatised Children. The programme, begun in 1992, encompasses creative activity and simple conversation to help the children express their fears and worries. Another part of its mandate is preventive: to help create a more peaceful future.
Programme activities take place in hundreds of schools and pre-schools, refugee camps and primary health care centres throughout all the republics of the former Yugoslavia. An estimated 150,000 children aged 3 to 16 have participated, and about 1,000 teachers have been trained to help them. In 1994, UNICEF provided about US $600,000 worth of assistance to the project.
[Quoted from: UNICEF, 'Former Yugoslavia: Healing Mental Wounds', January 1995]
ST 5
The slight figure in baggy shorts hunches over a school desk and talks bout his life as a hardened killer. Paul is 15, an orphan, and calls himself by his guerrilla nickname, Born to Suffer. At the age of 10 he started fighting in the savage civil war in Liberia and has lost count of how many lives he took with gun, grenade and machete.
Now Paul, along with a dozen others, is enrolled in the Children's Assistance Programme (CAP), a detention centre-cum-school in a compound on the outskirts of Monrovia, the battle-scarred Liberian capital on the steamy coast of West Africa. CAP is run on behalf of the United Nations Children's Fund by Liberian social workers dedicated to helping these damaged boys escape their brutal past and find a new life.
Like most of Liberia's child soldiers, Paul was swept up in bloody factional fighting that erupted towards the end of 1989. Armed men burst out of the bush around his village and threatened to behead his widowed mother unless he joined their tribal militia. After perfunctory guerrilla training, he was thrown into battle, an AK-47 rifle on his back, grenades and machete on his belt. 'I was scared the first time my commander ordered me to shoot someone. But once I discovered how easy it was to kill, it didn't both me any more,' he says.
[Quoted from: Philip Jacobsen, 'Babes in Arms'. Sunday Times. 31.3.96]
ST 6
Teacher Emergency Package
The Teacher Emergency Package (TEP) consists of a kit of materials and a methodology of teaching basic literacy and numeracy in the mother language of the pupils.
There is a box containing slates, chalk, dusters, exercise books and pencils for eighty students (in two shifts). The teacher's bag contains blackboard paint, brush and tape measure so that teachers can create their own blackboard on a wall if necessary; white and coloured chalk;
pens, pencils, pencil sharpeners and felt markers; ten "Scrabble sets" so that teachers can create language and number games for the children; three cloth charts (alphabet, number and multiplication), an attendance book, a note book and the Teacher Guide - which outlines the pedagogical methods and the content of lessons to develop literacy and numeracy.
The kit covers grades one to four (approximately) and is designed for a six month span of learning that then phases into the formal text-book-based curriculum.
The UNESCO team has also developed a training programme for the implementation of TEPs based on a "train the trainer" approach. Once a core group of national trainers has been trained (by one of the UNESCO team) these trainers in turn move out to train head teachers or representative teachers. These people in turn train their colleagues at the school level. This approach has several advantages:
· It allows national staff to develop psychological ownership of the programme (not generally the case when they merely receive handouts)· It also develops an independence and an infrastructure that augers well for the next phase of the formal curriculum
· In addition there is a strong ethical base for using as many national staff as possible in a programme of reconstruction
[Quoted from: UNESCO PEER, Programme for Education for Emergencies and Reconstruction, n.d.]
