Mission Statement
Towards Real Mutual Tolerance

By Koïchiro Matsuura

The purpose of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), created in the aftermath of a global war, was to help build peace in the minds of men through the mind's own instruments: education, science and culture. The full meaning of those familiar words might be weighed anew today. Human beings a half-century ago had inflicted unprecedented torment upon their fellow creatures by perverting education, to feed intolerance; by twisting science, to kill on an industrial scale; and by debasing culture, for purposes of hatred and to the point of manipulating whole masses to murderous effects never seen before. Mid-twentieth-century humanity took stock and paused on the brink of self-destruction. The harm done in human minds might only be cured, it was finally grasped, through resort to the same instruments but to sound purpose: education for global peace, tolerance and respect; science for worldwide development and common well-being; and culture to instill a deeper, wiser understanding of the best, not the worst, in universal human achievement. UNESCO Photo Only the same magic spear, which first caused the wound, may then heal it—so tells a beautiful image in medieval European legend. The healing lancet still lies in our own minds. This is why the words in the founding constitution of UNESCO remain as relevant as ever. But they must be made pertinent to today's globalized age, when every major scientific, technological, industrial, cultural or political development occurring anywhere on earth affects every one of its inhabitants, for the better and, if we are not wise, for the worse. We share a common fate, and know it, in a biologically threatened natural environment. Despite this past decade's hopeful new political thaw, too many trouble spots in our common home remain besmirched by conflict and bloodshed, spawned in turn by squalor, resentment, intolerance and hate. Yet, we now enjoy all needed capacities to overcome these, in the minds of men. Education, science and culture are so closely interlinked that to classify them as distinct categories is a mental construction for clarity's sake, and to help implement things practically. Education is basic, our first stage towards beginning to understand the complex world we live in, so that we can steer our individual futures as responsible, informed adults with some power over our own destiny. It is the initial rung on any social ladder out of poverty and dependence throughout the developing countries, where two thirds of today's global population live, and where more than 30 per cent are less than 15 years of age. No progress today, no sustainable development tomorrow, are conceivable without broad-based education for all, as an absolutely universal and fundamental human right, with no discrimination in regard to sex, creed or social origin. Education—or the lack of it—quite simply underlines the old split between rich and poor. Educational tools, whether traditional textbooks or new technologies in information and communication, give us every means to bridge that gap with a will. The will, at least politically, was manifested at the World Education Forum, held in Dakar, Senegal in April 2000. Member nations emphasized the guiding role of UNESCO in promoting true quality education for all, in defending the need for a public service ensured by the State even in the face of current privatization, albeit while taking full advantage of new openings offered by cooperation with the private sector and civil society's many dynamic non-governmental organizations. But the task of UNESCO is to sustain that political will with financial backing, if it is to help Member States, particularly developing ones, translate the Dakar Plan of Action into practical reality. Some $8 billion would be required annually to fulfil the Plan's guidelines and essential recommendations—an awesome figure when we realize that only some $700 million are currently earmarked for education, internationally, by official development assistance. I have repeatedly urged a major increase in this amount from international donors and with the Development Assistance Committee of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. In fact, much of the capacity of UNESCO to deliver education aid depends on persuading such donors to turn political wishes into financial clout to keep up the momentum of Dakar. The content of education itself, of course, is everywhere, radically affected by new developments in science. The Dakar Plan of Action commits us to help ensure ready access to scientific knowledge for students throughout the world. But more subtle issues enter into play. As scientific breakthroughs modify our everyday lives and yield increasing but disquieting command over our natural environment, sharp philosophical questions must be raised and ethical issues defined. How do we ensure wise use of our own technical mastery? Which goals do we assign to the impressive tools we forge? What sort of planet do we intend to bequeath to our children and grandchildren, to all future generations? As a universal intellectual forum for the world's nations, UNESCO hosts in-depth debates on such issues as planetary import, probing necessary moral response to questions ranging from medical research on the human genome to the industry's impact on the biosphere, in order to help forge guidelines through such bodies as the World Commission on the Ethics of Scientific Knowledge and Technology, established in 1998. One such universal challenge that UNESCO addresses, for example, is water. Industrial pollution and reckless exploitation endanger the biodiversity of our oceans and inland seas, some of which are already visibly dying. Not only the teeming life of salt water but even the ready availability of fresh water are threatened everywhere. Water knows no frontiers. It is a precious global resource to be nursed as a common good through sound policies agreed to by all. UNESCO seeks to harmonize international approaches to water conservation through the many scientific disciplines required from multiple points of view: medical, environmental, social and political. Water management forms part of our larger concern for the planet's well-being through such other UNESCO programmes as Man and the Biosphere, with its worldwide network of selected nature reserves for the study and conservation of the earth's precious biodiversity. The 1999 UNESCO General Conference allocated a total budget of $6,714,000, with a foreseen possibility of raising it to $7,442,900 for its ongoing International Hydrological Programme in 2000 and 2001, whereby, in close association with national governments and as many as 24 UN organizations, it would monitor and husband exhaustively the world's water resources, both fresh and salt, to marshal scientific data pertaining to hydrography and closely linked climatic effects and, through such planetary cooperation, to help ward off future catastrophes to our shared environment. The UNESCO role here is a driving one: to achieve greater insight through such research on water and thereby give informed policy advice to national governments. What we do to our waters is not ordained by fate; it involves conscious moral choice on our part and an ethical commitment towards our common earth, fellow creatures and posterity. UNESCO also trains its ethical focus on defending human dignity, and this very much involves a cultural dimension. Recognition of every people's priceless gifts to our common civilization is to acknowledge their central human dignity. Today's globalized culture would be a threadbare thing indeed without the many contributions of humanity's varied civilizations, aptly compared to a precious form of biodiversity itself. The United Nations family designated the year 2001 as one of "Dialogue among Civilizations", but in a very real sense, UNESCO has contributed to such exchange ever since it was founded. Its many cultural programmes throughout the world, in close partnership with Governments and eminent scholars and experts, have helped preserve great architectural and artistic monuments of our common past and the wondrous natural sites that mould our common sensitivity and imagination. Our publications have made available through multiple translations the outstanding works of all literatures, while new initiatives stress more vulnerable but no less valuable forms of culture: humanity's intangible heritage of song, dance and crafts. Such work, along with the Organization's parallel defence of fundamental human rights, like gender equality or freedom of the press, can lay abiding foundations for a true culture of peace, whose teaching UNESCO encourages throughout schools worldwide, that is, in the minds of tomorrow's men and women. As we learn what members of the human family have borrowed from one another, we achieve real mutual tolerance, predicated on appreciation and respect. Such is the world commitment of UNESCO. We are a tool at the world's service, one which operates through full cooperation with Member States, leading centres of learning, dynamic private firms and the great organizations for social improvement. Such an important international tool must function properly. Our self-reform programme has no other purpose but to ensure standards of excellence with the means we have and within the fields of our designated competence, without spreading ourselves too thin. We must act where we can make a difference, where our contribution amounts to an added value to the practical initiatives of others. I have launched a comprehensive process of reform to rationalize and rejuvenate the work of UNESCO, improve its practical efficiency, limit duplication, and render management and recruitment as transparent as possible. The trust that the world invests in us is one that we must earn, and live up to; a measure of that trust was eloquently indicated when Member States in Dakar reaffirmed the Organization's role as the leading agency in a global drive for a quality education for all. But this is only one of the many tasks that UNESCO is called upon and intends to fulfil. We stand ready for the twenty-first century. Comments

Koïchiro Matsuura is the Director-General of UNESCO

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