Chroniques des impressions, découvertes  et autres bizzareries faites dans "mes lectures bibliographiques" :

 28.10.06

Dans leur livre “Action Planing for Cities”, Nabeel Hamdi et Reinhard Goethert présentent trois critiques envers  les politiques d'aide au développement menées par les pays occidentaux. 

La première consiste à dire que les politiques d'aide au développement ne proposent pas de stratégie de croissance économique qui intègre les pauvres mais cautionnent un système qui génère plus d'exclus et ensuite offrent des programmes d'aide qui n'ont qu'un objectif palliatif. 

La seconde démontre que les projets menés par les organisations pour le développement sont souvent la cause d'importants traumatismes sociaux, économiques et environnementaux pour les pays concernés.

Bien que ces deux premières critiques me sembles intéressantes,  c'est surtout sur la dernière que j'aimerais m'attarder.

Cette dernière tente de remettre en question le système académique des pays occidentaux tant du point de vue de son contenu que de sa finalité. Je trouve particulièrement intéressant de publier ici cet extrait, étant donné qu'il présente différents éléments qui font écho à  la démarche que je suis en train d'entreprendre pour mon travail de Master.

"    In the third place, critique is levelled firmly at the inappropriateness of education and at the decline in morality, creativity and self-respect amongst intellectuals. This is inspired by “the overwhelming number of academics and the bureaucratization of academia” (Schrijvers 1993, 34), and is reflected in two dominant trends: first, in the content and organisation of academic programmes; second, in the nature of academic enquiry itself. How can these trends be explained?

            First, as the competition for students and research funds intensifies, so too does the demand for schools to distinguish their merits and expertise. This search for distinction, geared as it must be to winning students, attracting research funds and influencing academic bureaucracts is, therefore, driven by market or “client”-specific rather than subject-specific need. The result is for academia increasingly to adopt the institutional values and ambitions of government grant authorities, industry and funding agencies, which it then subsumes in its research and transfers to students in the content and practice of teaching. Most students are, therefore, still corporate clients, and by celebrity professionals and opinionated critics. The crises of vast movements of population, of protracted natural an man-made disasters, of endemic poverty, of environmental degradation o political instability, and of global realignments amongst nations, economies or development agencies, feature only peripherally in the education of architects, planners or engineers, all of whom still dominate development work (Hamdi 1996).

            When there is innovation, it is driven by a management ethic, not an intellectual one, with indicators of performances designed to ensure good ratings for the next round of grand awards and to impress visiting evaluation  committees. The emphasis in this respect is with performance-related targets – with staff : student ratios, accountability to central administration and improved means of straff productivity. These bureaucratic pursuits bring with them a demand for entrepreneurship amongst staff. Those who before had maintained the high ground of academic debate have voluntarily or otherwise stepped down into the swamp of commercial enterprise and competition. It is here, increasingly, and in student popularity where academic careers will be
decided. 

            The result is that the most conscientious find themselves paralysed by guilt o ambition, or simply “by the amount of energy it takes to keep the system going” (Lodfe 1994). Those who pursue subject-specific interests – whose concerns are to improve the lot of the poor majority living in slums and shanties, and to contribute something tangible and immediately useful – find themselves discarding much of their disciplinary or intellectual rigour and, therefore, their conventional career opportunites; and most of those who chase careers, workings mostly where international or corporate interests are at stade, find themselves without political reason or social relevance. These issues are reflected in the nature of academic enquiry itself, which is the second dominant characteristic of current academic trends.

            Schrijvers (1993) suggests that academics can choose one of three options currently available to them in research. First is the dominant positivist (or reductionist) approach, based on a cleat separation between the observer (subject) and observed (object). Here, observation is strictly objective and its methods are largely normative and hegemonic. That is, conclusions, modes and laws are drawn up which assume universal value and relevance; and the observer assumes that he or she becomes the prime repository of that knowledge which is the passed down from those who have it to those who don't. Dependency and intellectual colonisation are inevitable outcomes.

            Second is the critical approach in which political and moral values are central to research methods and teaching. Ideology and culture rather than neutrality direct the acquisition and interpretation of knowledge. Thinking, however, remains strictly separate from doing.

            Third is the transformative approach, which builds on the former but whose academics do not assume that their experience or knowledge is necessarily paramount. Mediation between organisations and enablement in the process of change, are its themes, as are getting involved, learning by doing and empowerment of the grassroots. ... . Suffice it to say here, that schools find this approach troublesome because it involves work in settings which cannot easily be measured against strictly formal criteria. It doesn't fit timetable, involves activities on the doubtful side of rigorous academic enquiry and for teachers seems to undermine their authority (Lloyd 1985, 80-83). When students step out from the idealised world of academia into the diverse, untidy, inconsistent, uncertain and competing world of practice, they therefore face more hard choices: between the idealised goals of their disciplines and the desired goals and needs of their public, between the certainty ad consistency of their academic teachings and the change and uncertainty of practice, between the strict timetables to which they were taught to adhere, and the open-ended programmes of development projects, between the high ground of intellectual self-fulfilment and the “swamp” of practice. "

J'aurai d'autres occasions de revenir sur le titre de mon travail, mais la dénomination Recherche-Action tente d'exprimer cette volonté de suivre cette troisième manière de produire de la connaissance. Connaissance qui se veut la confrontation à une expérience de terrain, une connaissance locale et sans finalité universaliste, qui doit servir avant tout à participer à une transformation de la réalité des personnes concernée.