Can we educate for world peace? - World of Learning - October 1985 - Brief Article

UNESCO Courier, Dec, 2001

Extracts from the opening remarks by Archibald MacLeish during a radio discussion with Dr. F.L. Schlagle, President of the U.S. National Education Association, Mr. Herbert Emmerich, Director of the Public Administration Clearing House, and Dr. Francis Bacon, member of the Educational Policies Commission of the National Education Association, broadcast on 12 December 1945, one month after the establishment of Unesco.

"Of course we can educate for world peace. I'd be willing to go a great deal farther than that, I'd be willing, for my own part, to say that there is no possible way of getting world peace except through education. Which means education of the peoples of the world. All you can do by arrangements between governments is to remove the causes of disagreement which may become, in time, causes of war. But peace, as we are all beginning to realize, is something a great deal more than the absence of war. Peace is positive and not negative. Peace is a way of living together which excludes war, rather than a period without war in which peoples try to live together.

"But the difficulty with this kind of discussion is not the answers. The difficulty is the questions. And the trouble with the questions is that they are put--have to be put--in words which have lost their freshness and their reality of meaning (...)

"The real problem (...) is one that goes a lot deeper. It has to do with the effect on the human mind of words like 'international understanding' and 'education' and 'culture' (...)

"Before we can talk intelligently and meaningfully, therefore, about questions like education for peace, or the creation of international understanding, we have got to find the abrasives which will scrape these words down to their living meanings again. For some reason which I have never been able to understand, people are quite willing to believe that anything you call 'economics' is real and that you call 'politics' is exciting, but that anything you refer to under the general words which describe the life of the human mind is necessarily dull and stale and unrealistic and fuzzy (...)

"Actually, in the world we live in, which is very different from the world we think we live in, the relations of peoples to each other in terms of the things they think and the things they believe and the things they hope, in terms, that is to say, of their mental processes, of the things that distinguish them as men, are far more vivid--make, to be brief, far more sense than the economic and political arrangements between governments which capture the front pages of our minds as well as of our newspapers(...)

"I am not belittling the tremendous importance of economic solutions for economic difficulties and political cures for political mistakes. I am saying that these things, important as they are, are far less important than the creation of a world of words and images and mutual knowledge within which people may talk to each other.

"What we tried to do in London was to invent an international instrument which could help us all to create that world by the use of all the channels of communication--education and radio, press and scholarship, motion pictures and music, journalism in all its forms and living, enduring arts. If the question you are discussing is the question whether our international instrument will work, I am going to ask my colleagues Emmerich and Schlagle to put me down as voting Yes."