Students have a hell of time grasping the spirit of UNESCO, the vital principle animating not only the formal organization but also the huge community of people and organizations that choose to affiliate with UNESCO in order to advance its mission. UNESCO’s founders told us in the
UNESCO Constitution that UNESCO was about building structures in the minds of men, about changing the zeitgeist that had led to two world wars and the holocaust. UNESCO Director General Irina Bokova restates that objective, writing that UNESCO must work towards “
a new humanism for the 21st century” – that is a vision shared by many peoples, drawing strength from their diversity, forming their common intentions and their mutual will to pursue peace and understanding. The mindset that UNESCO seeks is one that values objective truth, that is informed by the best of human culture, that understands peace not only an end to be desired but as something that must be worked for, that values communication as an end in itself. And thus the problem. How are we to understand such a shared vision; how is the zeitgeist to be changed?
Given the unique spirit of UNESCO, it is not surprising that that it is a unique enterprise, perhaps more a movement than an organization. At one level UNESCO is, of course, a decentralized intergovernmental organization within the United Nations system, the repository of a collection of international declarations, resolutions and conventions. It is historically the descendant of the Bureau for International Education and the Intellectual Bureau of the League of Nations. Uniquely, UNESCO’s constitution calls for member states to create national commissions for UNESCO involving the intellectual communities (educators, scientists, cultural leaders and knowledge workers) both to advise their governments on UNESCO and to link their national communities with the work of UNESCO and with the intellectual communities of other nations. Finally, the UNESCO spirit has imbued schools, clubs, cultural and natural sites of world importance, bioreserves, geoparks, university chairs and many others to affiliate with UNESCO and independently work to carry out its mission.
(S)ince wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defenses of peace must be constructed;….
(I)gnorance of each other’s ways and lives has been a common cause, throughout the history of mankind, of that suspicion and mistrust between the peoples of the world through which their differences have all too often broken into war;…
(T)he great and terrible war which has now ended was a war made possible by the denial of the democratic principles of the dignity, equality and mutual respect of men, and by the propagation, in their place, through ignorance and prejudice, of the doctrine of the inequality of men and races;……..
For these reasons, the States Parties to this Constitution, believing in full and equal opportunities for education for all, in the unrestricted pursuit of objective truth, and in the free exchange of ideas and knowledge, are agreed and determined to develop and to increase the means of communication between their peoples and to employ these means for the purposes of mutual understanding and a truer and more perfect knowledge of each other’s lives;
In consequence whereof they do hereby create the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization for the purpose of advancing, through the educational and scientific and cultural relations of the peoples of the world, the objectives of international peace and of the common welfare of mankind for which the United Nations Organization was established and which its Charter proclaims.
From the Preamble to the Constitution of UNESCO
UNESCO can be, and often is seen as a bureaucratic
organization with a couple of thousand international civil servants, mostly
located in the Organization’s Paris headquarters, with a budget of some $600
million per year.
There is another, complementary way of understanding UNESCO,
and that is as a place where ideas are generated and elaborated to be widely
disseminated by the networks that affiliate with UNESCO. Perhaps the most
important phrase in the Preamble to the UNESCO Constitution, quoted above, is
that “it is in the minds of men that the defenses of peace must be
constructed.” Those defenses are built idea by idea, as a rampart is built
brick by brick.
UNESCO, of course, is identified as a place for ideas about
peace. It emphasizes intercultural dialog and interreligious dialog. As
directed in its Constitution, UNESCO focuses on education, natural, social and
human sciences, culture and communications as vehicles for the promotion of peace and the common welfare of
mankind.
In the following sections I will show some samples of how the spirit of UNESCO is embodied in action.
UNESCO Conventions
Consider the role of UNESCO in promulgating international
conventions.
International
Conventions are subject to ratification, acceptance or accession by States.
They define rules with which the States undertake to comply.
UNESCO provides a venue in which representatives of its
member states may negotiate the terms of these international treaties. However,
it has no power to enforce the terms of conventions. Rather, nations that
choose to ratify a UNESCO convention also undertake to establish the laws and regulations
to assure that their obligations under that convention are met. Examples of
UNESCO conventions are:
· Education: Convention on the Recognition of
Qualifications concerning Higher Education in the European Region. This
convention is the basis for the harmonization of higher education in Europe, a
process which is helping bridge historic differences among the peoples of
Europe.
· Natural Science: Convention on Wetlands of
International Importance especially as Waterfowl Habitat. The so called
RAMSAR
network established under this convention includes 1951 wetlands in 160
countries.
· Social and Human Sciences: International
Convention against Doping in Sport, which went into effect just before the 2008
Beijing Olympic Games.
· Culture: Convention concerning the Protection of
the World Cultural and Natural Heritage (under which a network of 938 World
Heritage sites has evolved) and the Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and
Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural
Property (which has enabled ratifying states to regulate the illicit traffic in
art and archaeological artifacts).
· Communications: Convention relating to the
Distribution of Program-Carrying Signals Transmitted by Satellite.
· Other: Convention concerning the International
Exchange of Publications which encourages and facilitates the exchange of
publications between both governmental bodies and non profit, non-governmental
institutions of an educational, scientific and technical, or cultural nature.
25 conventions have been negotiated in UNESCO’s venue and
placed in its repository. Perhaps surprisingly, in some cases the secretariats
developed in support of the convention are not located within UNESCO.
An important aspect of these conventions is that UNESCO does
not police them. Rather member states negotiate them in the belief that they
are in the common interest and it is the member states that create their own
laws and regulations to implement the conventions. Thus, the ideas are
elaborated by representatives of the member states in the venue provided by
UNESCO, with the assistance of the UNESCO Secretariat, expanding and
illuminating a fundamental proposition of international cooperation. The member
nations then are responsible for deciding whether or not to ratify each
convention and for implementing the conventions which they do ratify. Thus it
is the governments of the member nations embody the spirit of UNESCO in this case, helping to achieve its mission through their actions.
Education for All
The Birth of the Education for All movement can be traced to
the
World
Conference on Education for All held in Jomtien, Thailand in 1990, and to
the
World Education
Forum held in Dakar, Senegal in 2000. The declarations from these meetings,
in which UNESCO was a sponsor, together with the
Millennium Development Goals for
education set the agenda for a global effort to expand schooling and increase
the numbers of children in school.
In addition to helping the global educational community to
define a set of EFA educational objectives, UNESCO
- has provided tools for educators and governments
to plan their educational programs,
- has helped to establish internationally accepted
standards for educational statistics which allow progress to be measured (and
to be compared among nations),
- has provided venues and support for Ministers of
Education and senior educational officials from groups of countries to meet to
discuss successes and problems in their efforts to achieve the EFA and MDG
educational goals, and
- has published an annual EFA Monitoring Report.
Again, it has been the global educational community that has
elaborated the ideas of education for all and which has implemented programs in
countries all over the world to create the institutions to achieve the EFA
goals. The role of UNESCO in the process has been catalytic, helping member
states to articulate their objectives and to measure progress in their
achievement.
Other Networks
Consider also the many networks of organizations which have
chosen to affiliate with UNESCO, thereby joining in the effort to disseminate
the messages promoted by UNESCO. Among those networks are:
• National
Commissions or comparable organizations in the 193 member states
• 66 Category II Centers and Institutes
supported separately by member states
• The Associated Schools Network, more
than 9,000 educational institutions in 180 countries
• The UNEVOC Network -- 282 specialized TVET
institutions in 167 UNESCO Member States
• ALADIN, the Adult Learning Documentation and
Information Network, with 95 documentation centers in 47 countries
• Community
of Practice in Curriculum Development has co-organised and/or participated in a
total of 98 workshops, seminars, conferences and symposiums
• University-Industry
Partnerships (UNISPAR) – S&T parks in such areas as biotechnology and ICTs, international training workshops and regional networks.
• SESAME
(Synchrotron-light for ExperimentalScience and Applications
in the MiddleEast) which is supported by a numbe of governments and which involves scientists from those countries in
scientific networks
• Microbial
Resources Centers (MIRCEN) for international scientific co-operation,
microbiological research and biotechnological applications
• 5
Biotechnology Education and Training Centres (BETCENs), one in each
region, which provide research and training opportunities in plant and marine biotechnology
• The
UNESCO’s water family which operates as a global network that works to implement the organization’s strategic goals.
• World
Network of Biosphere Reserves (WNBR), 580
sites in 114
countries
• The Great Apes Survival Partnership
• The
Group on Earth Observations (GEO) with 61 participating organizations
• The
Oceans Observatory System
• The
Tsunami Warning Networks
• International
Network of Women Philosophers
• The
Management of Social Transitions (MOST) program network of national committees
• The Creative Cities Network, 28 cities
• Goodwill Ambassadors, Honorary Ambassador, Special Envoys, Champions and Artists for Peace
• The
World Heritage List includes 936 properties
• The Organization of World Heritage Cities, 238
cities in which are located sites included on the UNESCO World Heritage List
• UNAL- UNESCO Network of Associated Libraries,
over 500 libraries are members of the Network.
• The Power of Peace Network (PPN)
• 348 international NGOs and 20 foundations and
similar institutions
• 3.800 associations, centers and UNESCO clubs
in more than 80 countries
• Private sector partnerships with NHK, L’OREAL,
HP, Microsoft, Danone, etc.
Huge numbers of people are involved in these networks
voluntarily. Indeed, there are many more people are included in these networks
than there are international civil servants in the UNESCO bureaucracy. Some of
the international NGOs affiliated with UNESCO represent millions of people,
such as the international umbrella organizations for scientific and engineering
societies and associations of teachers.
These networks consist of organizations and people
affiliated with UNESCO by their own choice, both helping to define UNESCO’s
agenda and advancing it through their voluntary efforts. They are self governed
with little or no supervisory, financial nor management input from UNESCO. They
are completely decentralized, collaborating with UNESCO only to the degree that
they are inspired and motivated by UNESCO’s mission and its leadership. Yet they
are an essential means of accomplishing UNESCO’s objectives. They too embody the spirit of UNESCO.
Partnerships
It works with many
non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Especially important in this respect are the international NGOs in education, natural and social science, engineering, culture, and communications. In many cases UNESCO was instrumental in the creation and/or development of these NGO. (
See more on this subject.)
- Giants of the computer industry, such as HP and Microsoft, working in education
- Organizations such as NHK Nokia, Panasonic, Google, the History Network and Google working with the World Heritage Center to spread interest and concern about would heritage sites
- L'Oreal working to encourage women in science and to provide health education in Africa to reduce the spread of HIV/AIDS.
Concluding Remarks
UNESCO’s mission is to promote “full and equal opportunities
for education for all”, “the unrestricted pursuit of objective truth”, and “the
free exchange of ideas and knowledge”. It is “to increase the means of
communication between….peoples and to employ these means for the purposes of
mutual understanding and a truer and more perfect knowledge of each other’s
lives.” It would be an error either to assume that this mission is carried out
primarily by the UNESCO bureaucracy or to underestimate the critical role of
those who chose to affiliate with UNESCO without incentives other than
enthusiasm for its mission.
Of course, not all the people in organizations in UNESCO networks
spend all of their time advancing UNESCO’s agenda, although many may well do
so. But even a small amount of effort per person when aggregated over very large
numbers of people can add up to a large total. Moreover, many people spend a lot of their time helping to achieve UNESCO's mission.
A problem with this view of UNESCO is that one can not see
ideas nor easily track their diffusion. Moreover, it is hard to understand the
impact of UNESCO’s staff and budget on the creation of ideas and their
diffusion. It is impossible to measure the impact that 100 publications per
year has on the world, and more so the impact of 10,000 publications over more
than half a century. The countries implementing UNESCO conventions don’t report
on the impact of the conventions on their nations, nor do the countries
implementing Education for All and the Millennium Development Goals report on
the impact that UNESCO has had on their schools and school children. Indeed,
the decentralized networks ascribed to UNESCO don’t report on resources,
activities nor accomplishments to UNESCO.
To the bureaucratic mentality, the lack of quantitative
indicators and formal monitoring systems is an almost insuperable burden. To
that mentality, the lack of quantitative indicators of the changes in the minds
of men and of the impact of UNESCO on those changes is tantamount to proof that
no such changes or impact exists. Clearly that is a false view, and not
everything that is important can be measured. The founders of UNESCO were right
in their vision that there was a real need to build the defenses of peace in
the minds of men, to encourage the unrestricted search for objective truth and
to promote the free exchange of ideas and knowledge.
Equally, however, there is a continuing need to encourage
the governments of member states and the extended networks attached to UNESCO
to devote their serious efforts to helping achieve UNESCO’s mission. Moreover,
in the absence of objective measures it is imperative to obtain the judgment of
our wisest observers of society to consider the success of UNESCO in
safeguarding is spirit and sharing it with others, to consider where and how
best to motivate UNESCO’s partners and networks, and how best to allocate
UNESCO’s scarce resources to achieve its mission.
Changing ideas in the minds of seven billion people is a big
job, and it is a job that does not lend itself to bureaucratic approaches. It
is through the efforts of large networks of people devoted to UNESCO’s spirit
that progress is being made.
So
many new ideas are at first strange and horrible, though ultimately valuable
that a very heavy responsibility rests upon those who would prevent their
dissemination.
J. B. S. Haldane
Man's
mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
The
key to every man is his thought.... He can only be reformed by showing him a
new idea which commands his own.
Ralph
Waldo Emerson
The Frequency of Words Linked to Key UNESCO Concept in Books Since 1900
