Understanding Through Cultures

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We consider the mother as the first university, and so the fate of any society depends on the woman’s attitude. The stronger the woman’s repression in a society, the more discreet, clever and pitiless is her revenge. This is pernicious and can be directed against the society itself. Man survives (at least his passions, his complexes etc.) through his offspring, and often people perpetuate the flaws of their forefathers and their dreams as well. If you want to have a healthy nation, you should care about the mother. Universities have a part to play in this respect, too.

To be efficient, a university’s primary function should be to free the inhibited psychological powers of the students, then to orient them towards an ideal to reach, or a goal to achieve.

A reality that a lot of people seem to ignore is that the development of the human populations on Earth has not been done in a homogeneous way. The same Africans who were taken as slaves to the United States, and their contemporaries who remained in Africa, didn’t follow the same civilization pattern of development. The interchangeability of the humans and their displacement in space raises problems. For example, if you bring an Indian out of the dark Amazonian jungle and put him in the heart of Paris or New York, you can praise to him all the good things of modern life, yet he won’t be able to adjust and will surely die of maladjustment, solitude and disorientation.

The place of residence of an individual reflects his personality’s structure. He is made for this environment to which he reacts and lives in symbiosis. Consequently, to avoid any imbalance of his personality, when possible, any student will gain much in following his higher studies in his natural social environment. The university should take into account that any person in any part of the world is a particular target that can be reached only through a language that is particular to him.

The problem that we face during any process of knowledge transfer, is finding out the adequate means through which these people are the most accessible to the knowledge we want them to acquire. And there is no doubt that here we are facing a cultural problem. It is up to most universities of the South to find ways to canalize the sleeping energy that is the students, into functional beings. It is important to know that when he doesn’t communicate, when there is no emotional exchange with the others, the student cannot invest himself. Therefore he doesn’t learn.

The first thing that the university should teach the student is that every individual is bound to live differently from the generation that precedes him. This is because his biological, spatio-temporal and socio-cultural parameters are different. His own existence, just as the existence of all living creatures of all living systems, is justified by two parameters:

1. By the very fact that he exists

2. By the fact that he integrates harmoniously and usefully to a wider whole of which he is a constituent – the society and the world surrounding him.

The objective of all human beings should be to valorize themselves by all means. The university can help them reach this objective. Socializing one’s activity, making it useful and profitable to the biggest number of people at the social scale (good deeds), always has a therapeutic dimension for the human being. But when man becomes convinced that his future amounts only to more humiliation, depreciation and decay, he might answer the call of violent behavior that always sleeps inside him.

And here we must point out to this obvious truth: By the kind of knowledge it provides, the university can be both a place of absorbance, or production of violence.

CONCLUSION

The university is expected to propose in the end, a project of civilization for the humanity: It must think of the world in terms of integration of the humankind. Integration, but in the difference.

Will the notion of brain-drain have a meaning in a world where humanity lives in integration? The notion of cooperation will make room then for the notion of interchangeability. The human being works where he serves better since the repercussions of his work will benefit humanity in its entirety.

If remedies to today’s incurable illnesses are discovered tomorrow, they will benefit people of all countries. The honor will certainly go to the country that will have made it available to humans and to the material conditions auspicious to this discovery. And gathering these material conditions is a fact of civilization.

We are all passengers of this spaceship that is the planet Earth. There are of course passengers of first, second and third class. It is a matter of material means. But no one amongst these passengers has the right to undermine or to damage this blue vessel in the name of unity of the human race. It is a matter of global safety.

Those who are currently conscious of this are those we call the “Greens”, the ecologists. Currently they seem to be the only sensible people in this mad world.

Will we be one day in the situation when someone will disembark on Earth, put his foot on the ruins of what will remain of our civilization, contemplate at what we will have made of it, and utter the expression “IGNORANTS”?  Ignorance is part of today’s human reality. Only knowledge can defeat it.

But the good minds need a fertile land to develop. And this Promised Land is the good universities. Through helping man to understand the secrets of his constitution, to become aware of his immense capacities, the university will then have held its promise of being a place of light, culture and fraternity.

The Past has been a time for sufferings for most of humanity. The Future remains full of apprehensions for it. The Present is the time of the university. It is a space of reflection on all the aspects of life on which to put forward the foundations of the future world – a world which will be good and safe for our children to live in.

The great universities have the secret to erase racial and class barriers. The aim of any university worthy of its name should be to unify the human thought in a big synthesis of the knowledge. The great countries have the art and means of building these kinds of universities.

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