I feel
honoured to greet the mothers and fathers who are members of our valued member,
FAPEL on the occasion of the association’s 30th Anniversary.
The big
family of European parents’ associations, EPA was also founded in the period
when FAPEL was born, 1985. Something was happening all over Europe in the
middle of the 1980’s as well as in other parts of the world. It concluded with
the adoption of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the most widely
accepted human rights document in the world. For us it is a very important
document because – while being part of the legislation of each European country
- it also defines the rights of parents and gives us rights, duties and
responsibilities in raising our children.
Parents’ associations in Europe have been active in the past decades to
demand governments to ensure our rights and give us the necessary support also
set forth in the Convention in fulfilling our duties and taking our
responsibility as parents for the best interest of our children.
The world
has changed in these 30 years and our present members – probably the children
of the founders of FAPEL – are facing challenges nobody dreamed about in the
middle of the 1980’s. The recent crisis - that is not even over for some EU
countries including Spain – drew our attention to education even more than
before. In the past 30 year Europe lost its competitive edge and fell behind
the USA and the Far East because our school systems were not ready for the
challenges of the new era. To start with: involving migrant parents in the
activities of a parents’ association has been a great challenge for EPA members
all over Europe. The generation of today’s parents live in a world, the digital
age that is not their homeland, a strange field for most of us, but we see that
our children are the natives of this world and we have to find new parental
role models to raise them accepting that in certain areas we are being educated
by them.
The EU
realised how important knowledge is when setting the Lisbon goals but failed to
fulfil them as they did not put emphasis on school and even pre-school education.
The past decade proved what we parents always knew, namely that you cannot
build a stronghold of knowledge on weak ground and supporting universities and
tertiary students is not enough. Thus the 7-year period of EU policy that has
just started set goals in school education for the first time in the history of
the Union.
To make our
children and the whole of Europe successful the now grown-up parents’
association have a great task to do. We have to use the decades of experiences
and the acknowledged status we have to make the transition from raising the
voice of parents to raising parents to realise that they all have a day-to-day
duty and responsibility within schools, in forming new curricula for the
digital age, in preventing early school leaving and also to accept that parents
are learners, too, as in the 21st century life-long learning is a
necessary part of our lives.
FAPEL and
EPA has been working together for many years now to raise the voice of parents
to make governments and EU-level decision makers be aware of the changes
necessary in school systems to really make parental involvement and distributed
leadership a reality. The real task ahead is to make all parents active in
carrying out their parental duties. The next 30 years will necessarily start
with this and I’m positive that more involved parents, exercising their
democratic duties and rights, will only make parents’ movements in Europe
stronger.
I wish everybody
in the FAPEL family another successful 30 years and I hope your children will
read a similar greeting by my children in the 60th anniversary
magazine.
Eszter Salamon
president
European
Parents’ Association
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