Street education

There are everywhere in the world adults, professionals or not, who daily involve themselves in the street, the districts and the suburbs. And this, in order to bring to the excluded a perspective of social emancipation : assistance, accompaniment, education, support, lend a sympathetic ear, give information, comfort with a view towards social emancipation.

Whether one calls them social street workers, educators and/or street entertainers, proximity workers, workers in open environment, detached workers or street workers, all of them regularly and resolutely commit themselves on the field in order to bring to youngsters and adults suffering from social discrimination, services of quality in which the human dimension, respect of the other person and confidence serve as cornerstone to the action.

This is for the players a matter of being most easily and most simply accessible to a group of children and of both young people and adults living in risky and unsafe conditions and a multiplicity of the forms of exclusion.

These players are particularly well placed to take note of the secondary effects of a certain degree of globalisation where the "non-productive" are so often left out in the cold and put on the scrap-heap.

For more than 15 years now, social street workers hold meetings concerning various projects, either during symposiums or seminars or, at European level within the framework of exchanges between youngsters as well as within the framework of the Voluntary European Service.

On such occasions, it appears recurrently that :

The street worker lacks practical and theoretical tools within the framework of his informal educational mission. Scientific studies establishing a link with what happens in practice are the exception.

The public of youngsters in difficulty – young street people, are seldom or never in touch with the existing educational facilities. – It follows that they hardly ever participate in the edification of tomorrow’s society.

Public opinion and certain public authorities have a false image of the phenomenon constituted by street kids. In certain cases, the programmes aimed at street Children – Youths are therefore not appropriate.

Social street workers as well as youngsters in difficulty very rarely make use of the new technologies of information.

The education of street is very misjudged and recognized in its social usefulness in particular in its dimensions of social emancipation and informal and non formal education.

No exchange or solidarity system exists, no specific information system for street workers exists.

Street workers often observe these problems on the field. Different studies go in the same direction.

The King Baudouin Foundation, the Soros Foundation and the World Bank have recently published recommendations in this respect. (Common programme of the King Baudouin Foundation and the Soros Foundations in partnerhsip with the World Bank : « Enfants de la rue – Enfants dans les rues » - June 1999)

However the field is rich in innovation and in creativity... but here is this type of intervention remains like its public, marginalized.

A simple network allows already very productive exchanges of practices but specially leads the street educators to shift field somewhat in order to consider its action in a globality.

The isolation of the street educators is also synonym with “withdrawn”. Indeed, this actors have difficulties of organizing themselves on an international level, either for lack of information, or for lack of relay, or that indeed the child and the street educator do not think even more that another thing exists apart from the district and of the street.

The fields realities North or South are different and the priorities are not the same for all one each one. Nevertheless, it comes out from our experience of network, the construction of a collective identity (Jean Blairon, in Proceedings of the International Forum for stakeholders on street children and street work – Dynamo international – November 2002) mobilized around similar stakes, at the same time local and international stakes of fight against poverty and discriminations.

A network constitutes an strategy of mobilization where the whole of the partners have to gain as well in the exchange as in the construction of new prospects social, educational and of human development durable, which is facilitated by the fact that we all share the same experience of field.

The street children

A recent study by the United Nations has estimated the number of street children in the world at more than 150 million. At the beginning of the eighties, we "only" talked about 30 million.

Beyond these catastrophic figures, when putting the rights promoted by the Convention on the Rights of the Child into actual practice, it is realistic to consider as well as an evolution to be feared that a large number of children will never experience the effects that one would rightfully expect.

For numbers of Europeans, it is those images of young Brazilian children, trotted out by the media, living in the streets of Rio de Janeiro that so symbolise the street children.

For public opinion, the street children are children absolutely without shelter. (Street Children published by the Council of Europe – 1994).

Alongside this minority, there are children (From birth to 18 years old)who, while conserving some ties in terms of where they live, enjoy living conditions that are becoming ever more precarious and are faced with forms of exclusion that are becoming ever more insidious.

At one time considered as victims of abuse and maltreatment, at another considered as delinquents, sources of insecurity even as a threat, to the North, as for the South, there is no day that passes without childhood being dealt with as a problem.

Today, the stigmatisation of "street-children" is burdened with consequences. Political leaders both, local and international, who are hardly unaware of the problem, adequately respond to these children and to public opinion and it has become a major issue of political contention all over the world.

Beyond the debates and the responses, often far from appropriate, safety-minded and technocratic, it is the position of the child that has been challenged, today, in our societies.

Are we evolving towards a kind of "children's apartheid" society?

From North to South, do not the new frontiers of education, of well-being and development also wend their way via the metropolises of the richer countries?