EEB2 Debate Club Invite Michael Gahler To Debate About Europe

EEB2 challenged Michael Gahler, Member of the European Parliament (MEP), to join a club debate on the future of Europe. 

The proposition team put forward the motion that the EU is doomed to failure.  Michael Gahler accepted the challenge to oppose this motion and the event took place on Tuesday 16th February in Salle Polyvolante.

EEB2 students prepared well for the debate and impressive arguments were made on both sides.

Over 500 people attended – all our S3 and S4 students.  Thank you for the support!

Well done to:

Ligaya

Alessia

Amy

Christina

Sofia

Gustavs

Emma

At the end of the debate, the motion was rejected – the EU is safe for now ☺



By Colm Kehoe

Edited by Gustavs Zilgalvis

"Brussels is a graveyard of living beings"

Belgium shut down all schools on the 23rd of November. The decision was made by our Prime Minister, Charles Michel. I was happy about it at first because it meant I didn't have to finish my math homework, but then, I realised it wasn't right at all.

The numerous measures taken over the past few days have made fear grow in our hearts. We often hear Charles Michel saying that the threat is "imminent". The threat of what, terrorism? The fact is that we have no idea of what is going on in this country. Belgian police authorities say it’s for our own safety that we don’t know anything yet, but is it really if we are too scared to leave our house?

The terrorists attacked Paris, aiming to destroy our culture and our way of life. They haven't attacked Brussels yet but we are doing the job for them anyway: we are destroying our lifestyle right now by shutting everything down.

The problem is that the government is doing this because they don’t know what else to do. Yesterday on the Belgian talk show "C'est pas tous les jours dimanche", the president and spokesman of the Free Union of the Public and Police Function, Vincent Gilles, admitted that they don’t know what the security level 4/4 means. This is because the government created the different levels of security without saying which necessary measures had to be taken, and where. 
I agree with the fact that we are “better safe than sorry”, but only to certain extent; we shouldn't just be safe, we should also feel safe and yet all these measures to the continuous “imminent threat” just make us feel scared.

by Sarah Mignot

Interview with Mr. Park

On Monday 19^th October, Professor Jinwhan Park from the Gyeongsang National University South Korea came to eeb2. Mr. Park is the president of “Philosophy with Children and Youth Network” in Asia and the Pacific (PCYNAP), he came to our school to explain this philosophical and ethical idea and I had the pleasure of interviewing him.

When you think of philosophy, you think of the academic one, the one we study, also known as the study of  nature and  its causes, of the principles of reality, of knowledge and our values, all based on logical reasoning. Mr Park's intention is not to teach academic philosophy to children. What he wants to do is teach them more about practical philosophy. By doing that, he teaches children how to be able to make an ethical and logical judgement in a particular situation. "It is crucial that younger students learn how to make a good judgement because some of them might be the future leaders of democratic societies so the sooner they are able to do it the better", he says. 

The Maori Dynasty

Many people know of the British royalty, the Japanese royalty or the Belgian royalty. However, not many people know that the Maori, living in New Zealand, have their own royalty too, despite having been a British colony! It is time for their history and lineage to be revealed!

 

First of all, who are the Maori? The Maori are the indigenous polynesian people of New Zealand. They were the first settlers on these islands, after having gotten there by the means of canoes from the polynesian islands. They lived there in isolation for more than seven hundred years, during which their culture and social customs, the basics coming from the polynesian customs, flourished.

They created tribes, a horticulture and later also a strong warrior culture.

The European colonists, mostly of Great Britain, started arriving on New Zealand in the 17th century; An arrival that changed the way of life of the Maori drastically. The Maori tribes, also called “iwi”, started to adopt many aspects of European society and culture.

Why We Should Help The Refugees

Since the beginning of the Syrian Civil War, in 2011, four million people have left the country, looking for better conditions of life elsewhere. To this day, countries like Turkey and Lebanon, which are geographically located near the war-torn country, have received and helped the great majority of the refugees. But now they are coming to Europe, and it is time for us to make an important decision, that will change Europe, and very likely the world.

The Role of the Observer, the Self and Detachment

The world exists as a thing in itself and as an appearance through the senses of the observer. The world of appearances consists of things as we know them by the ordinary means of sense experience and scientific investigation, in other words the empirical world. For Kant these experiences are the phenomena that make up the world. This nature of duality in the world reveals our limitation of knowledge as we can never know the world as it is in itself, but merely how it could appear to us as scientists, philosophers or ordinary perceivers. As Schopenhauer beautifully puts it- “The world is your idea”.

Why should we develop a critical mind?

In present day society, there are numerous ways of thinking, which are cut off from us – not because we’re incapable of them but because various blockages have been developed and imposed to prevent people from thinking in such ways. Being open-minded and having the capacity to see things from more than one point of view is a virtue that people should be encouraged to strengthen from an early age and which can often be found absent in parents and teachers – the people who are responsible for our education. Thus we must take it upon ourselves to not naively accept what is placed in front of us as the only option and use reason and creativity as the tool to free us from the narrow sphere of thought that is adopted by most people in the world right now.