UNESCO Without Borders

Educational campaigns for international understanding

Aigul Kulnazarova, Christian Ydesen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138188938
• eBook ISBN: 9781317281580
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) was established in 1945 with twin aims: to rebuild various institutions of the world destroyed by war, and to promote international understanding and peaceful cooperation among nations. Based on empirical and historical research and with a particular focus on history teaching, international understanding and peace, UNESCO Without Borders offers a new research trajectory for understanding the roles played by UNESCO and other international organizations, as well as the effects of globalization on education.

With fifteen chapters by authors from cross-disciplinary and diverse geographical areas, this book assesses the global implications and results of UNESCO's educational policies and practices. It explores how UNESCO-approved guidelines of textbook revisions and peace initiatives were implemented in member-states, illustrating the existence of both national confrontations with the new worldview promoted by UNESCO, as well as the constraints of international cooperation.

This book provides an insightful analysis of UNESCO's past challenges and also indicates promising future research directions in support of international understanding for peace and cooperation. As such, it will be of key interest to researchers, postgraduate students, academics in the fields of international and comparative education, education politics and policies, and to those interested in the historical study of international organizations and their global impact. The book will also appeal to practitioners, especially those who conduct research on or work in post-conflict societies.

Part I

Introductory framework

1 The nature and methodology of UNESCO’s educational campaigns for international understanding

Aigul Kulnazarova and Christian Ydesen

The past will never change, but the ways we think about it have never stopped changing.

(Adam Budd)

The year 2015 marked the 70th anniversary of two important events – the end of the Second World War and the creation of the United Nations Organization (UN) – both of which utterly changed the world order and reshaped international relations. Traditionally, states alone had been conceived as the principal actors in the play of international relations, but since the UN stepped onto the world stage, other institutions also began to assume increasingly important roles in all aspects of human life. The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) – one of the key organs of the UN – was established in 1945 with twin aims: to rebuild various educational, scientific, and cultural institutions of the world that war had recently destroyed, and to promote international understanding and peaceful cooperation among nations.

From its founding, the motto of UNESCO was a lofty one: “Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed”. Julian Huxley, the first Director-General of UNESCO, believed that such an international organization needed “a working philosophy”, based on “scientific world humanism, global in extent and evolutionary in background” (Huxley, 1946: 8). Although he often admitted such broad statements as establishing a world community free of war and violence, together with the aims and objectives laid down by its founders would “need amplification and occasionally clarification”, Huxley noted that, “with its stress on the concrete tasks of education, science, and culture, on the need for mutual understanding by the peoples of the world, and on the objectives of peace and human welfare on this planet”, UNESCO would stand as the international organization “debarred from an exclusively or primarily other worldly outlook” (Huxley, 1946: 7). The world with its deep historical divides over differences among cultures, politics, races, ideologies, and societies had been in large measure devastated by the Second World War. It was crucially in need of a body such as UNESCO:

[c]harged with promoting both the higher activities of man and their practical application, and of doing so on an international scale, [it would be] the most likely agency to make this dual approach and to speed up this necessary process of reconciliation.

(Huxley, 1946: 62)

In this book, we set out to conduct research into UNESCO’s educational campaigns. The rise in violent conflicts and growing international tensions concerning human security, development, terrorism, and cultural divergence in our modern society have especially generated our interest in the origins, nature, and effectiveness of the organization’s past campaigns. UNESCO aimed at creating better international understanding across national and cultural borders, and at promoting long-lasting peace throughout all parts of the world. Academics and practitioners have often critically raised the issue of UNESCO’s idealism (Jones, 1999; Mundy, 1999, 2007; Pavone, 2008), in particular, concerning its foundational principles of building peace (Kashlev, 1986; Morito, 1959; Negin, 1959), noting “its mandates are rather blurry, its fields are not precisely drawn, and many of its programs are not easily evaluated” (Sathyamurthy, 1967: 616). Even so, UNESCO still stands apart from other specialized organs of the UN System for no less than its gaining a worldwide image of being “the moral, normative, standard-setting element of the UN”, as argued by Jones (1999: 22).

In addition, Sewell notes UNESCO has “an institutional personality” (1975: 17) for it has established many active forums, meetings of experts, and seminars, which have not only engaged participants from all over the world in thematically organized discussions but also, as claimed by Barnett and Finnemore, because it “creat[ed] a shared discourse, symbols, and values for [its] staff [and others]” (2004: 19). Thus, with so many elements involved, conducting research into the programmes and policies of UNESCO can be challenging in addition to rewarding.

When postwar peacebuilding and reconciliation efforts became a major focus of international and institutional policies, what UNESCO first called for was that:

[n]ew ways of living peacefully together must be discovered and must become ingrained in human society. They must be learned and learned widely. To establish firmly new forms of social behaviour requires new forms of education. Education must be re-shaped, so as to fit men to live peacefully together, no less imperatively than education must be re-shaped to fit men to live in an era of new technology. Educators are summoned by the United Nations to re-shape education along these lines in the simple words of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: “Education shall be directed . . . to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance, and friendship among all nations, racial, or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace”.

(UNESCO, 1965: 5)

Precisely 70 years after UNESCO offered these new policy guidelines, we find them still relevant in the present. We agree with Weiss et al. (2007) that “history does not necessarily determine the future, but history often affects the future in that it provides insights, lessons, and even prescriptions for policy” (2007: xxix). We believe it also offers opportunities to review, reflect, reassess, and retrieve influential lessons and insights from UNESCO’s initial campaigns. We find they were based on the principle of building friendly relations between peoples and states with differing social and political systems as well as on the notion of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms.

The special programme for textbook improvement, including the parallel revisions of national histories and the teaching of history as a means to promote international understanding, launched in 1946, was one of the key priorities of UNESCO’s educational campaigns. As expressed by Jean Bloch-Michel, for UNESCO:

[t]he teaching of history should no longer serve as a basis for aggressive nationalism . . . The issue is not one of research, historical knowledge, or the resulting theories; it is simply the teaching of history, and especially, history taught to children.

(Bloch-Michel, 1951: 2)

Concerned that knowing too much of the world’s troubled past too early might carry burdensome effects into young children’s learning experiences, UNESCO’s international textbook campaigns were foremost aimed at making recommendations to world governments to improve the teaching of history and encourage better mutual understanding between the peoples of the world. UNESCO did not intend to write the textbooks for its member states, but it did rather wish to aid in the writing, through its field experts, in removing any causes of “aggressive nationalism” and potentials to spawn wars that some textbooks could have been thought to promote, even covertly. To determine the purposes and objectives of teaching a “better” (or maybe “objective”) history, UNESCO at first applied practical methods of direct contact and communication. For that, it organized a great number of seminars with delegates from member states and meetings of experts on the subjects of history education and international understanding. The following seminar titles offer a sampling of topics addressed in the early years: “Education for International Understanding”, held in Sèvres, France (1947); “Training of Teachers in Education for International Understanding”, in Ashridge, UK (1948); “Education of Children from Three to Thirteen Years of Age”, in Podebrady, Czechoslovakia (1948); “Meeting of Experts on the Improvement of Textbooks”, in Paris, France (1950); “History Textbooks”, in Brussels, Belgium (1950); “History Textbooks Meeting”, in Braunschweig, West Germany (1951); “Teaching of History as a Means of Developing International Understanding”, in Sèvres, France (1951); “Education for Living in a World Community”, in Woudschoten, Netherlands (1952); “Meeting of Experts on Education for Living in the World Community”, in Paris, France (1953); “International Expert Meeting on Improvement of Textbooks for the Objectives of East-West”, in Braunschweig, West Germany (1962); along with numerous others.

The work accomplished at these seminars subsequently made its way into policy recommendations and guidelines for textbook revisions in addition to publications that encouraged member states to pursue educational reforms designed to improve the content of history teaching and the materials used to do so (Bloch-Michel, 1951; Hill, 1953; Lauwerys, 1953; UNESCO, 1946, 1949, 1951). Moreover, the seminars and publications sought out answers to correct false assumptions about the human past and collective memories, which were still particularly raw and overt in a world so recently devastated by warfare. Even so, Faure corroborates that textbook revision was not “exclusively determined by states” and offers his view in an extension of Barnett’s and Finnemore’s articulation:

External experts appointed by the organisation were also major actors. Their advice was taken seriously because they were in a position to share experiences and know-how they had gained in other revision forums. As a consequence, UNESCO’s revision activities were influenced by other textbook talks.

(Faure, 2011: 32)

Our primary approach for this study is founded on archival-based empirical and historical research. Factual, textual evidence concerning UNESCO’s campaigns is available in the form of readily accessible boxes, folders, and documents. Sources consulted mainly include the UNESCO Archives, the Brazilian National Archives, the Historical Archives of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, the German Federal Archives, the National Archives of Japan, the National Archives of South Africa, the State Archives of Belgium, the State Archives of the Russian Federation, the US National Archives, and other similar institutions. While relying on them, however, we also keep in mind that the archival sources we use “to support our arguments are never the unambiguous sources for those arguments” (Jackson, 2006: 493). Here, we follow the idea of Reinhart Koselleck – one of the most profound German theorists of history and historiography – who provided the following statement in this regard: “A source can never tell us what we ought to say . . . a theory of possible history is required so that the sources might be brought to speak at all” (Koselleck, 1985: 156). The authors support the first-hand sources, whenever possible, of the literature on the subject available to them, and they then think of or rethink those past events in their own independent, scholarly, curious ways.

Recall the opening epigraph to this chapter: “The past will never change, but the ways we think about it have never stopped changing” (Budd, 2009: xiii). In that light, we offer the following as our principal purpose for this volume: to trace past relationships among international, regional, and local ideas, knowledge, and discourses, through policy documents, statements, recommendations, and guidelines, and to examine their actual operations in each case study. A secondary purpose is our investigation into the roles played by prominent individuals – men and women – who contributed to UNESCO’s discourses and policy recommendations, and who devoted themselves to implementing textbook revisions and strengthening international understandings in their respective countries and regions. We will discuss the work of André Puttemans in Belgium, Cyril Bibby in the UK, Georg Eckert in Germany, Saburo Ienaga in Japan, Paulo Carneiro in Brazil, Jaime Torres Bodet in Mexico, and many others who put forward their vigour and lives to build a world free of war and violence.

The authors of this volume approach the central theme in original and substantive ways by combining historical data drawn from institutional and national archives with methods of discourse and impact analysis. In addition, many archival and other primary and secondary sources that were originally written in languages other than English, such as Afrikaans, Dutch, French, German, Japanese, Norwegian, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish, have been translated by the authors for the purpose of this research investigation. Some chapters provide case studies set in various locales across the globe, while others offer broad thematic treatments concerning history teaching, textbook revision, and the politics behind the education for international understanding, peace, and cooperation programmes that UNESCO promoted among nations. Policies and practices implemented or aimed to be implemented in member states illustrate the existence of both national confrontations with the new worldview promoted by UNESCO, and the constraints of international cooperation. UNESCO Without Borders comprises five parts, including an “Introductory framework”, with each section examining a key aspect of the educational campaigns for international understanding.

Falk Pingel’s chapter, which organically flows with this chapter to form Part I of the book (“Introductory framework”), contributes to the emerging literature on UNESCO by bringing into focus the issue of international textbook revision. While many international textbook revision programmes concentrated on history, theoretical concepts, and underlying assumptions, Pingel draws our attention to the four dimensions – psychological, pedagogical, political, and scholarly or subject-specific – reformulated in the process of textbook revisions by UNESCO. He also insists that international textbook revision was a programme “induced by a political, intergovernmental organization”, and was therefore initially grounded in the notions of “international bargaining and strategies of implementation”.

In Part II (“Campaigns for international understanding and peace: UNESCO’s challenges and opportunities”), five chapters cover events that occurred in individual countries, as well as offer thematic examinations of two UNESCO programmes – “Atoms for Peace” and “Education for Living in a World Community”. While these analyses bring forth different insights, each also touches upon challenges and opportunities UNESCO faced. The section opens with Chapter 3, in which Randle Hart draws directly on the analysis of two contrasting yet parallel campaigns that emerged in the postwar US. He argues the creation of the UN and its subsidiary organs coincided with important social, cultural, and political shifts occurring in the US, which eventually resulted in right-wing coordinated campaigns fighting against the presence of UNESCO’s textbooks in American public schools and libraries. As promulgated by conservative activists, such textbooks were filled with communist propaganda meant to bring up American children to accept living under a communist-dominated, “one-world” government. In contrast, groups of pro-UN activists and librarians rose to oppose such campaigns by organizing anticensorship and counter movements across the country, as intriguingly recounted by the author.

Aigul Kulnazarova and P...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• UNESCO Without Borders
• Routledge Research in Education
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• PART I Introductory Framework
• PART II Campaigns for International Understanding and Peace: UNESCO’s Challenges and Opportunities
• PART III UNESCO and the Politics of History Education: Local and Global Discourses
• PART IV UNESCO’s Experiments with Race, Science, and Antiracism
• PART V UNESCO and International Understanding in a Divided World
• Conclusion: A Model for Future Institutional Research?
• Index