E/CN.4/2005/88 page 16 64. In all the countries visited by the Special Rapporteur during his mandate indigenous communities and organizations complained that the authorities were not doing enough for them in the area of education. Education for indigenous peoples would seem to be the “ugly duckling” of national education programmes and in general to be assigned low priority and inadequate budgets at the national level. Such complaints were heard by the Special Rapporteur during his missions to the Philippines, Guatemala, Mexico, Chile, Colombia and Canada. He has also received information and documentation from many other countries in which similar situations exist. 65. Education is not imparted only in classrooms. Audiovisual media are increasingly important, and with the arrival of telecommunications in indigenous communities (especially television and the Internet) vast opportunities for distance learning have been opened that are still being explored in many areas, especially at the secondary and higher levels. This development is exemplified by the services provided by the University of Athabasca to various indigenous education centres in western Canada. However, the problems mentioned earlier that hold back the expansion of bilingual intercultural education become even more acute where telecommunications are involved: a lack of trained teachers, inadequate teaching materials, teaching methods that are still in the developmental stage and so forth. Considerable progress has been made in some countries in the use of community radio stations for educational and cultural purposes, while in other countries such efforts run counter to legislation that gives priority to corporate commercial interests and sets up obstacles to educational broadcasts. With the support of the National Commission for the Development of Indigenous Peoples, legislation in Mexico has been amended to increase opportunities for action by an extensive network of community radio stations operating in indigenous areas, but these stations run up against the commercial interests of private broadcasters. 66. Given the havoc once wreaked by the imposition of rigid models of educational, linguistic and cultural assimilation in indigenous communities, some peoples are trying to recover traditional communal types of non-formal education. To this end they draw on the wisdom and knowledge of older persons, which is once again appreciated after having been devalued by formal educators. Many interesting and successful examples of this can be seen, for example among the Maori of Aotearoa New Zealand, some of the First Nations in Canada, the Sami in the Nordic countries, the Mapuche in Chile, the Quechua in Ecuador, the Masai in Kenya, the Ratanakiri in Cambodia, among the Sungai in Malaysia, the Chakma in India and many others. Sometimes these efforts form part of more structured education projects, while in others they take place outside the context of formal education. In all cases, however, they help to save the knowledge of the aboriginal culture, enhance cultural pride and identity among young people, strengthen ties to the land and the environment and offer indigenous youth an alternative view of the future. 67. Multilingualism and multiculturalism are not the closed preserve of indigenous communities. In fact they can only be successful if the prevailing attitudes of the national society can be changed. As the UNESCO Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity says, contemporary societies must recognize that they are multicultural in more than one sense, since in addition to indigenous peoples there are also national and ethnic minorities, immigrants from different cultures and other groups demanding the right to exercise their cultural identity. For the most part, indigenous peoples are virtually invisible in the formal education systems of the urban and rural non-indigenous population. What is more, they are often treated with contempt