Building A Europe of Knowledge
The European Union adopted its first education programme (the COMETT programme, designed to stimulate contacts and exchanges between universities and industry) in July 1987. This programme was rapidly followed by the ERASMUS programme, which promoted inter-university contacts and cooperation, as well as substantial student mobility (as, in 1989, did the "Youth for Europe" programme, the EU's first youth exchange support scheme). These programmes were adopted by the EU countries but with considerable support from the European Parliament which made budgets available even before the legal instruments had been adopted.
The European Union has two different types of instrument to increase the quality and openness of the education and training systems of the EU's Member States: a set of policy instruments through which EU countries are encouraged to develop their own education systems and to learn from each other's successes; and a substantial programme to support exchanges, networks and mutual learning between schools, universities or training centres as well as between the political authorities responsible for these areas in the different Member States.
Read more about this topic: Education In Europe
Famous quotes containing the words building, europe and/or knowledge:
“Are we not madder than those first inhabitants of the plain of Sennar? We know that the distance separating the earth from the sky is infinite, and yet we do not stop building our tower.”
—Denis Diderot (1713–1784)
“The heritage of the American Revolution is forgotten, and the American government, for better and for worse, has entered into the heritage of Europe as though it were its patrimony—unaware, alas, of the fact that Europe’s declining power was preceded and accompanied by political bankruptcy, the bankruptcy of the nation-state and its concept of sovereignty.”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)
“A knowledge that people live close by is,
I think, enough. And even if only first names are ever exchanged
The people who own them seem rock-true and marvelously self-sufficient.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)