Peace Through Education (Routledge Revivals)

The Contribution of the Council for Education in World Citizenship

Derek Heater

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415641395
• eBook ISBN: 9781136176586
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

First published in 1984, Peace Through Education records the history of the first 45 years of the Council for Education in World Citizenship (CEWC). It describes the rise in interest of increased international understanding in the years preceding the book's publication and highlights the influential role of the CEWC in encouraging educators to make the rising generations aware of threats to world peace. Created in 1939, at a time of tense international crisis, the organization's record is both an important and fascinating story. The book provides an overview of the history and work of the organization and assesses how far the Council has achieved its objectives, and how successful it has been in satisfying needs and wielding influence.

Chapter 1

---

The Setting

---

Public Opinion and World Affairs

Philosophers and dreamers, in moods of despondency and imaginative creativity about the human condition, have speculated over the course of centuries concerning the prospects for a just and harmonious international order. War, in truth, has been an engine of social progress. Yet it has also wrought such grievous suffering that the roots of conflict have been eagerly sought by scholars so that these causes might be counteracted for the benefit and safety of future generations. As with all complex historical and social phenomena, there is a danger and temptation of oversimplifying the causative factors. In the case of war, a variety of ingredients mix in various proportions according to particular historical circumstances: territorial expansion; economic and commercial advantage; the lure of ‘glory’; defensive and preventative strategies; the arms-race pressures of the ‘military-industrial complex’; the diversionary motives of domestically unpopular regimes; and the chauvinistic and bellicose temper of public opinion. Each factor has, of course, its peace-making mirror-image in both theory and practice: adjustments of state-boundaries; a more just international distribution of wealth and goods; a more broadcast realization of the horror of war; a secure balance of power; effective application of international law – even world government; and the harnessing of a global public opinion determined to expunge warfare and injustice from the world.

Is war more a response to human desires or to human needs? The belief that men fight wars rather because they want to than because they must has been strongly held by many commentators. Did not Aristophanes teach this basic truth, however much tongue-in-cheek, in his Lysistrata? Moreover, that great modern authority on the nature of war, Quincy Wright, believed ‘that psychological rather than economic factors have been responsible for war’ and ‘that education should deal with the conditions which make general belief in the obsolescence of war rational and even necessary.’¹

This book is written from this fundamental premise of the significance of popular attitudes, opinions and wishes. The underlying assumptions are: that public opinion has a crucial potential role in deciding between global conditions of justice and peace and those of injustice and war; that public opinion must be educated in the values of justice and peace; and that vital lessons may be learned from the activities of the organization (namely the Council for Education in World Citizenship) that has been continuously dedicated to such educative tasks with successive younger generations in Britain over the past half-century. We may adapt Vegetius and assert: let him who desires peace prepare the rising generation.

Yet the role of public opinion in world affairs is too controversial an issue to be left without further comment. Political doubt and intellectual uncertainty still linger, indeed, in this democratic era to cloud our perception of the proper role of the citizen in relation to world affairs. For there are compelling reasons for believing that the general mass of the populace are normally ignorant and apathetic about foreign affairs and that when they are roused, tend to be xenophobically aggressive. Henry Durant of Gallup Poll roundly declared that ‘the ignorance and lack of interest of the public in foreign affairs are proverbial.’² A particularly telling example of this ignorance can be cited from the gallup polls themselves. In 1963, only a short while after de Gaulle's famous veto, several millions of respondents thought that Britain was in fact already a member of the EEC.³ Similarly depressing evidence of the shaky condition of public opinion, though in a different sphere, was revealed by the ‘Schlackman Report’, commissioned jointly by the Central Office of Information and the Ministry of Overseas Development in 1977. The findings showed so little popular understanding of Third World problems that the report spoke in terms of a ‘national introversion’. One of the conclusions was that, although only 46 per cent of the sample were in favour of British aid, ‘26 per cent say they have not heard or read anything about the problems of poorer countries.’ The pollsters concluded that ‘ignorance is no bar to holding strong opinions in this area.’⁴ A final example should perhaps be a sobering reminder of how readily so many people in Britain fell into a mood of joyful jingoism during the Falklands conflict in 1982, epitomized by such notoriously rabid Sun headlines as ‘GOTCHA!’ (about the controversial sinking of the Argentine cruiser, General Belgrano).⁵

This evidence of a negative frame of mind about world affairs should occasion no surprise when one considers the number of barriers that inhibit the growth of an alert globally-minded public opinion. We may note some half-dozen.⁶ In the first place, Britain's stature in the world and her international self-confidence have obviously declined during the course of the present century, and markedly so since 1945. Popular interest in foreign affairs seems to have paralleled this decline. Secondly, foreign affairs are so much more complex and difficult to understand than domestic politics. Indeed, and this is the third factor, the modicum of attention that the ordinary man-in-front-of-the-television pays to political affairs is largely reserved for such economic questions as inflation, wages and taxes that impinge upon his life so very much more directly than foreign issues. Moreover, and fourthly, British governments and politicians have rarely encouraged the public to take an active interest in world affairs. Fifthly, the media, especially the tabloid press, provide relatively poor coverage and explanation of foreign affairs. Finally, education. Although an increase in the number of schools consciously adopting a global perspective to the curriculum has been noticeable recently (especially in the guise of Development Studies and Third World Studies and most recently Peace Studies), such developments have taken off from a very low base.

Some of these indices of public ignorance and apathy can, indeed, be quantified by using four basic yardsticks: press coverage, television ratings, opinion polls and election issues.⁷ A few indications must suffice here. In 1970 Peter Calvocoressi declared that ‘British Press coverage of world affairs is deplorable.’⁸ In the following year a rough analysis by Elliott and Golding showed that the Quality’ papers devoted just 22 per cent and the ‘populars’ only 10 per cent of their news space to foreign affairs.⁹ Yet even these figures give an exaggerated picture, since some of the tabloid foreign stories are of the sensational, celebrity kind and home news is actually read more often than overseas. Just as commentators have made adverse comments about the press, so criticisms have also been levelled at poor television coverage of foreign affairs.¹⁰ Yet the current affairs programmes that the television networks do screen attract very small audiences. Thus, Austin Mitchell has revealed that the percentage of viewers watching Panorama fell from 17 per cent in 1966 to 8 per cent in 1972.¹¹ Similarly, opinion polls tell the same story. For example, in 1963 Butler and Stokes asked 2000 respondents to list the most important problems to which the government should give attention. The responses showed that ‘the whole realm of foreign affairs and defence provided less than one in ten of the problems mentioned.’¹² Election manifestos, perhaps not surprisingly, mirror this public judgment of priorities. For instance, an analysis of the apportionment of space in manifestos from 1945 to 1974 shows an average of 17 per cent in Labour's and 13 per cent in the Conservatives' devoted to foreign matters.

There would thus seem to be neither advantage for a politician in trying to court public opinion on foreign issues nor any justification in shaping foreign policy to accord with popular wishes. Democracy would appear to be almost bifurcated: public involvement in domestic affairs; public exclusion from foreign. How has this ambivalence between the idea of democracy and its application to foreign affairs come to pass? Part of the explanation lies in the building up of the modern democratic tradition upon the demands for popular control over essentially domestic economic and fiscal matters. Partly, too, the retention of executive control over foreign policy was slow to be challenged. Foreign policy, it has been and still is argued, is technical, requires subtlety (even secrecy) in conduct, and relates to distant lands and peoples about whom the ordinary citizen can have little real understanding. It is further argued that to submit the conduct of a nation's external affairs to the whims and vagaries of popular opinion could be positively dangerous – indeed, that recent history is replete with lessons warning of the undesirability of so arranging matters. The general populace are xenophobic and self-centred, either easily roused to warlike passion by any ambitious demagogue or ever slumped in a sloth of apathy about any affairs beyond their immediate, narrow ken. Walter Lippman, in his wise and elegant essay on public opinion, declared that ‘as history shows, democracies in their foreign policy have had generally to choose between splendid isolation and a diplomacy that violated their ideals.’¹³

And yet the coin does have another, indeed quite shiny, side. In the first place, even if ‘theories of democracy are oddly reticent about problems of foreign policy’¹⁴, there is surely a clear and powerful common-sense argument against restrictions on popular involvement in foreign affairs. Such a constraint produces a democracy that is hobbled or paralysed in a vital limb. The argument from popular ignorance and apathy indeed borders on the danger of arrogant circularity: the public should be kept in ignorance in case it demands undesirable policies which are bound to be undesirable because of its ignorance! There is the peril, too, that when a government does bend before the pressure of an ignorant and prejudiced public opinion, the resultant policy might well in consequence run counter to the true national interest. That way lies the worst of all possible worlds: accept the democratic possibility of popular influence, yet discourage the public from responsibly informing itself in the anxious hope that it will thereby be dissuaded from bringing its influence to bear. But the crowning argument is surely this. If we accept the basic democratic principle that the citizen has a right to some control over his destiny, then in the name of what principle are we to deny him that right when it comes to matters of war and peace, political identity, alliances and trade, and the exploitation of the only planet that we have? Are the citizen's rights to be abridged to matters relating to taxation, education and social services? Is he to be allowed a say in his future life, but not in his future possible death? Democracy must surely be indivisible.

Nor should the potential of public opinion for a beneficent influence in foreign affairs be underestimated. Governments both past and present, untrammelled by popular influence, have displayed no great wisdom in handling the affairs of our world. From Jeremy Bentham's Plan for an Universal and Perpetual Peace to Woodrow Wilson's League of Nations, and beyond, writers and politicians who have bent their minds to the problems of war prevention have underlined the vital, pacific role of public opinion.¹⁵ In recent years, in fact, the urgings of leading commentators for greater public involvement in world affairs have become increasingly insistent in all the major spheres of concern. Examples may be readily gleaned from questions relating to human rights, Third World poverty, nuclear weapons and the United Nations.

In defence of human rights, Jacobo Timerman, the persecu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Foreword by HRH The Duke of Gloucester
• Chapter 1: The Setting
• Chapter 2: Origins in War
• Chapter 3: The United Nations and the Preservation of Peace
• Chapter 4: Administration and Finance
• Chapter 5: Services Provided
• Chapter 6: Conclusions
• Appendices
• Note on Sources
• Index