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Overview on the Culture & Education for Transformation Assembly

In countries throughout the world, artists, educators and cultural activists are creating strategies to construct paradigms of education capable of forming sustainable communities of solidarity, cooperation. This movement coincides with a consensus that we need to change the performance of the world before it is too late.

However, though there is a consensus among us that our artistic languages need to be integrated into formal and informal education to nurture our multiple intelligences and capacities to create a just, human and sustainable world, we cannot be naive. Arts in education are being replaced by laptops and essential literacies throughout the world and the large majority still think of the arts as elitist luxuries, irrelevant to their lives. How can we sensitize families, teachers, social movements, journalists, industrial producers and governments to cultivate the popular understanding and political will to transform the existing dominant dehumanising, competitive and destructive paradigm of education?

The WSF process has a key role in this necessary sensitization. The Assembly for Culture and Education for Transformation aims to develop cultural formation and methodological dimensions for the next WSF so that we can demonstrate that another humanity and solidarity in practice are possible.

We are not proposing that the arts can solve the existing world. Nor are we saying that these human languages of reflection, experimentation and cultural production can alone change authoritarian cultures into democratic cultures. But without a broad understanding of the transformative dimension of culture and of our artistic languages, we will not be able to implement or sustain any innovative politics, solidarity-based economy, or visionary social project.