It has just gone midday. The three thematic workshops (on the basis of social inclusion, on education as access to the labour market, and on education as a fundamental right) are now well under way. I have been wandering between them, listening in on the debates, and I have gathered a few snippets and soundbites to give a flavour of the discussions. Luigi Berlinguer (MEP); ‘it’s not just a matter of access to education, but access to the success that education should bring.’ Mostafa el Ayoubi (Editor in chief of ‘Rivista Confronti – Education in the Mosques’); ‘we need a European education policy because national education policies change with each change of government.’ Charlotte Gruber (President of the European Network of Social Integration Enterprises); ‘social integration enterprises are a vital part of our social fabric but many remain largely invisible because they lie between the social and the economic.’ Also, by the same speaker; ‘because so many social integration enterprises are not entirely economically viable and rely heavily on creativity and voluntary work, they have fared better in the economic crisis than might have been expected.’ Cesare Moreno (President of the Association ‘Teachers of the Street’ – a Neapolitan organisation working to reintegrate street children and school dropouts); ‘during the war there were formal armies but there was also the resistance. In Naples, a heavily bombed city, there was a sense of resistance against the hardships that bombardment brought. In the same way, in education, in our societies, we need to complement formal education and formal processes with popular resistance.’

The biennial conference continues this morning. The opening session has just finished. In it, the Committee’s rapporteur, Maria Candelas Sanchez Miguel, presented the main themes of her opinion, adopted in the April plenary session (see 28 April post). As usual, it is invidious to single out particular speakers but I feel I must mention Stefano Zamagni who, thirty years ago, was my professor at the Johns Hopkins University Bologna Center (as was his wife, Vera) and has clearly lost none of his intellectual brilliance. If absolute poverty is almost non-existent in Europe, he argued, there is a disturbing increase in relative poverty – disturbing because it threatens social cohesion and democracy. In Zamagni’s opinion, much of this trend can be attributed to insufficient and inappropriate education and training. The third industrial revolution has changed the structure of the labour market from the previous pyramid to a new ‘hour glass’ type structure, with the choking point not at the menial or specialised level, but in between. Accordingly, Zamagni continued, schooling for all is necessary but not sufficient: ‘study is not enough; you must be appropriately qualified’. To study and graduate and then become unemployed is damaging psychologically and damages the social and political fabric. Moreover, informal education is an increasingly important complement to formal structures and non-profit and charitable organisations (several of whom have stands in the Piazza outside our conference) have an important role to play. Zamagni’s speech was an excellent aperitivo for the work of the three thematic workshops that are just getting underway now.

The conference had just got under way this afternoon when shouting and chanting started in the piazza outside, led by two young men with a megaphone. It was a well-timed demonstration by a collective of unemployed former students and former students (mainly teachers) in vulnerable jobs. The demonstration was well-timed in two senses. The first was that it coincided perfectly with the delivery of the set-piece speeches inside. The second was that the subject matter being protested outside coincided well with the subject matter being discussed inside. By chance, our conference was being guarded by an abnormally heavy contingent of carabinieri (a nearby consulate is expecting visitors!) and that was surely mis-read by the students as hypocrisy on our part (any one of them would have been welcome to attend the conference and make their point of view known). So I went and spoke to them in the piazza and explained that they were in fact preaching to the converted when it came to the importance of education and employment. I asked them to draft a declaration, which they did, and I promised to put it on my blog, which I have (click  ‘read the rest of this entry’ below). I confessed that I had a nostalgic soft spot for them. In the autumn of 1979, when I first set foot in Italy, in Bologna, there were serious student riots and serious clashes with the carabinieri. The riots were about rents for student lodgings. The stench of tear gas hung over the university quarter for over a week. There was strong fellow feeling among the students of the Bologna Center at the time, of which I was one. I’d better say no more! But I hope the student protestors I met will come to the Committee’s site and see that, actually, it is constantly concerned with the sort of themes that so impassion them.

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Well, the ashcloud behaved itself and so I was able to fly down here to Florence yesterday afternoon in time for the final preparations for the President’s Biennial Conference on the theme of Education to Combat Social Exclusion. The conference is being organised in a very appropriate place, the Istituto degli Innocenti in the Piazza della Santissima Annuziata, for long a hospital and foundlings home. Our President, Mario Sepi, has necessarily made the economic and financial crisis and its social consequences a leitmotif of his mandate and over the next three days, in workshops and plenary sessions, a series of distinguished guests, together with our members and representatives of various stakeholder organisations, will be discussing how education can best be used to avoid or diminish the scourge of social exclusion.

This morning the Committee hosted the third Western Balkans Civil Society Forum. The opening key note speaker was Michael Leigh, Director-General for Enlargement in the European Commission, who was followed notably by Montenegro Ambassador Andrija Pejovic, before a series of thematic workshops addressed such issues as the implementation of economic and social rights and the reinforcement of the role of civil society organisations. In parallel, in different meeting rooms on the same floor, the EESC’s Budget Group and Communication Group were meeting. The latter was discussing, among other things, a possible mission statement for the Committee. The draft speaks of the Committee’s three roles. The first, explicitly Treaty-based, role is to provide opinions on legislative proposals or at the request of the institutions. The second, more implicitly Treaty-based, role concerns the growing concept of participatory democracy and the need for structured and regular dialogue with civil society (I’ve written quite a lot about this on the blog in the past). The third role is not Treaty-based but is nevertheless of growing importance. Increasingly the Committee is looked to by the other institutions – and particularly the Commission – to ‘look after’ the civil society aspects of external relations, whether in the enlargement context or bilateral or regional relations or, indeed, trade and development. This morning’s forum was a good illustration of that third role.

That unpronounceable Icelandic volcano has been at it again, and its unpredictable antics are posing potential logistical challenges for the European Economic and Social Committee. Later this week, from Thursday through to Saturday, the Committee is holding a major conference in Florence on the theme of education to combat social exclusion. The Committee is pulling out all the stops for this keynote event, a culmination of Mario Sepi’s Presidency, which will see Mario Monti and José Manuel Barroso address the closing session on Saturday morning. The potential logistical challenge would arise if flights out of Zaventem are stopped on Wednesday, which is when many members of the administrative team and quite a few of our members are planning to fly down to Florence. The probable solution we have found is to hire a bus. It will involve an eighteen hour (at least) trip, but it’s clearly the cheapest alternative. All the same, fingers crossed for a change of wind direction!

We rounded off a short but relaxing holiday weekend with a viewing of The Big Lebowski (parental warning; occasionally, the actors do not swear in this film), written and directed by the Coen brothers. This comic romp, with Jeff Bridges’s portrayal of ‘The Dude’ echoing Eliott Gould’s portrayal of Philip Marlowe in The Long Goodbye, deserves its cult status.  The script, including ‘cuss words’, ranks up there with The Producers for comic dialogue (the best excerpts can be read here). I particularly liked John Goodman’s portrayal of Vietnam Vet, Walter Sobchak. There were several such oddball characters knocking around in Bologna in the late 1970s, profiting from the GI Bill and lax entry requirements at the university to become permanent students. They were generally nice people but, like Sobchak, they had a screw loose and could suddenly turn paranoid – sometimes violently so. I remember one’s graphic description of his war experience. Frequently shot at by an enemy he never once saw, his job from hell was to drive a jeep up and down a road in the middle of the jungle for hours on end to maintain the polite fiction that the road was free. No wonder he had a screw loose.

Sometimes, our children’s activities drag us into interesting worlds we would never otherwise have experienced. Such was the case this evening. Our daughter’s dance troupe was performing at the Palais des Beaux-Arts as the interval act during the 2010 finals of the Future Model Contest Belgium. The twenty-five finalists, divided into age groups, had to go through their paces – freestyle, boxers/bikinis, dinner jacket/evening dress – in front of an at times partisan crowd. Two aspects of the experience were particularly noteworthy. The first is that, like boxing, this is clearly an activity where immigrant youngsters can hope to make a breakthrough. Indeed, few of the finalists were Caucasian in appearance and even then we spotted an Eastern name or two. That explained, in part, the partisan crowd. These were not just parents and siblings rooting for their daughters and sons; these were people of modest means hoping for an economic lifeline. The second remarkable aspect was the sheer courage of the young people up on the stage. It takes guts to parade in a bathing costume in front of a whistling, cheering, jeering, catcalling crowd. I hope all the finalists make breakthroughs; they certainly deserve it.

Back in the 1960s when I was… well, when I was – my older brother and I would spend every Saturday morning in the local ABC cinema as proud members of the ABC minors’ club. We’d dash eagerly up the high road and queue patiently outside. Each session started with the club’s song, sung to the tune of Abe Holzmann’s Blaze Away, played on the cinema’s organ (every cinema worth its name had one in those days). You can hear the authentic sound of the tune here. The lyrics flashed up on the screen and a red bouncing ball indicated what we should be singing. I can still remember the tune and the words: ‘We are the boys and girls well known as/Minors of the ABC/And every Saturday we line up/To see the films we like/And shout aloud with glee/We love to laugh and have a singsong/Such a happy crowd are we/We’re all pals together/The minors of the ABC!’ Pure, innocent bliss. Then came the movies: The Lone Ranger, Casey Jones, The Alamo, Tarzan, Lassie and, somewhere in there, Robin Hood. This evening we saw the latest version. Mmmm….  What a mish-mash; from references to Shakespeare’s Henry V (the king anonymously out among his troops on the eve of the siege of a French castle) through to 1066 (rainstorms of arrows) and Saving Private Ryan (the mayhem and massacre of landing craft on well protected shallow beaches). Pace what I have written in previous posts, this one is not a lazy way to learn your history. But it’s good enough entertainment, I suppose – including Russell Crowe’s comic accent. There are few highlights in the script (‘My grief has been waiting for this moment’ was the only one I noted), but it chugs along and, with one disastrous exception (a pub joke based on a misunderstanding between ‘one knight’ and ‘one night’) pretty much avoids attempts at humour. With great brass neck it already announces the sequel (‘the legend begins’). But the 1960s boy in me judges all Robin Hood films by my 1960s memories, and so they are all, I suppose, doomed to fail: ‘Robin Hood, Robin Hood, riding through the glen/Robin Hood, Robin Hood, with his band of men/Feared by the bad, loved by the good/Robin Hood, Robin Hood, Robin Hood…’ If you listen carefully, you might just pick out my voice here.

To La Monnaie earlier this evening to see an excellent production of Massenet’s Don Quichotte. We did not get to see José van Dam in his swansong role, but (no offence, José) we didn’t really miss him because Vincent Le Texier was brilliant as the tragi-comic Don. In the fourth act Dulcinée agrees that ‘Oui, peut-être est-il fou, mais c’est un fou sublime!’ And that is exactly how Le Texier sings/plays the role; the Don as a sublime fool. There was another star of the show; Laurent Pelly’s set, which is constructed of countless pages from the books that have sent Don Quichotte mad. Lionel Lhote’s Sancho Panchez gave a moving and thought-provoking portrait of loyalty. I left the theatre vowing that I would find the time this summer to read Cervantes’s novel. By chance, we noticed that the première of this opera at La Monnaie was on 14 May 1910 – almost precisely 100 years ago!