"UNESCO AT FIFTY : THE EDUCATIONAL MISSION" BY DR. R.V. VAIDYANATHA AYYAR
A country's economic vitality goes through a cycle like that of the human individual. Shakespeare's seven stages of man, from "infant, mewling and puking in its nurse's arms" to "old age, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans everything", puts it strongly, because countries are not exactly born and do not die. The economic trajectory of a country will vary widely from case to case As a rule it starts slowly, then picks up speed, rockets along a period, and ultimately slows down, following an S-curve.... Like human beings, the growth of a state can be cut off by accident or catastrophe short of old age, that is, it may be stunted by eternal forces. Unlike human beings, however, economies can have a second birth.
Charles Kindleberger1
As UNESCO turns fifty it is the moment for introspection, for charting out the mission for the next few decades. Would the world have been different if there were no UNESCO? Or, to paraphrase Voltaire, if UNESCO does not exist is it necessary, to invent it? Does UNESCO need a second birth to face the challenges of the next fifty years and escape the mature phase of S-curve? Associated with these seminal questions are a host of subsidiary questions, rather matters of detail. The Miollis Group, comprising members of the Associations of Former UNESCO Staff members (AFUS), had contributed to the process of reflecting on UNESCO's past and thinking about its future by addressing a number of issues in a thought provoking document.2 The issues include:
= UNESCO as an organization is devoted to the promotion of peace
and development and has, to some extent, linked the two - the
1 Charles, Kindleberger, World Economic Primacy 1500-1900.
2 Miollis Group, UNESCO Faces the 21st Century: An Invitation To the Dialogue (Paris:Association of Former UNESCO Staff Members, October 1995).
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promotion of peace through development. But has development always promoted peace or are these concepts unrelated?
= As an intergovernmental organization, UNESCO is prevented from intervening in matters that are essentially within national jurisdiction. How can the pursuit of universal ethical aims be reconciled with the need to be respectful of national sovereignties?
= UNESCO's fields of responsibility have been determined largely in the light of the Second World War and the post-war bipolar world. Are these fields sufficiently universal to remain as guidelines into the 21st century or do they need revision?
= The theoretical demands on UNESCO are virtually unlimited, technology and culture, cultural identity, cultural change education for all, lifelong education, use and misuse of die media - to mention just a few of the main problems facing die world today that fall squarely within UNESCO's realm. What should be the priorities? How should they be determined'? Should there be concentration on only a few problem areas?
= UNESCO has two main roles; on the other hand, it is an agency carrying out operational activities, mainly in the developing world. Can UNESCO do both? If so, should the structures be separate or joint?
= UNESCO's programme, i.e., its activities, is drafted by the Secretariat and approved by the Member States in a complex, laborious, hence costly process. How can this process be rationalized while making the selection of activities more flexible and responsive to needs?
= UNESCO is governed by two institutional bodies -- the General Conference and the Executive Board -- and by a Director-General. The, interplay between these forces and the role played by the Secretariat are exceedingly complex and not always symbiotic. How should UNESCO be governed and how can this governance be improved?
= Despite years of efforts to decentralize the Secretariat, the Parisian flavour of the Organization has never been dispelled. Can (or should) an intellectual organization be decentralized? If so, what philosophy should underlie decentralization? Is decentralization in its present from a blunder?
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UNESCO has developed several ways of evaluating itself, from both inside and outside. The results have not always been flattering, but introducing change seems to be difficult. What type of evaluation would be most useful? How can one ensure that the results of evaluation are effectively taken into account?
This paper seeks to touch upon some of these issues in so far as education is concerned. The objective is to provoke debate and discussion rather than offer definitive answers or recipes.
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The single most important contribution of UNESCO has been its exposition of a perspective of education that complements the economic perspective of education. UNESCO can, as Frederico Mayor did, rightly take credit for consistently advocating a humanistic perspective of education:
The specific realm of UNESCO is intellectual life, i.e., asserting the value of the human mind. We should therefore concentrate our efforts on the development of human resources in order to return, after decades of strategies marked by a narrow economism, to die, very heart of development, i.e., the human acquisition, transfer and sharing of knowledge, which is the key to all processes of emancipation, individual and collective .... Development for peace and peace for development are the two main strands, closely intertwined in the Medium Term Strategy as it has been devised for the years 1996-2001. The main objectives underlying it are, in essence, to reach the unreached, to include the excluded, to facilitate the exercise of civil rights and the participation of everyone in development and learning to live together despite disagreements and differences.3
Be it quantum mechanics or public policy, "a complete elucidation of one and the same object may require diverse points of view which defy a unique" description".4 Multiple realms
3 Frederico Mayor, Preface to Document 28 C/4, Strategy for the Medium Term (Paris, UNESCO, 1995).
4 Enunciated by Niels Bohr in respect of Quantum mechanics, cited on Weinberg Steven, Sloak's Hoax, New York Review of Books, vol.X(III), no. 13, 8 May 1996, pp. 11-15.
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coexist in any given society, e.g., economy, polity and culture. These realms are not congruent with, each other, have different rhythms of change and follow different norms and rationalities which legitimise different, and even contrasting, types of behaviours.5 Thus economic rationality is driven by concerns of efficiency. It assumes that main issues in any society are, in a fundamental sense, economic and that there is a need to get economic policy and economic objectives solved before other issues can be adequately addressed.6 It legitimises the private pursuit of greed as such pursuit furthers epithalamially public welfare. In contrast, political rationality is driven by concerns of legitimacy These concerns entail trading off equity and efficiency, and decision-making by bargaining or by law. It is the disjunction of the realms that renders public policy an argument without an end. Every public issue spans more than one realm; education, science, or for that matter, any other area of public policy cannot be reduced to a branch of economic policy, or of social or cultural policy. When it was announced that the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) intended to convene the first ever meeting of Ministers of Science in October 1963, the then Netherlands Minister of Education was reported to have rushed to Paris to try to persuade the OECD Secretary-General to cancel the meeting. "Science", he argued, " is an aspect of knowledge and its policies are an integral part of cultural policy. To discuss them in an economic environment would amount to prostitution".7 To altogether rule out a role for economic rationality in culture, education or
5 Danniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (London: Hienmann, 1976).
6 Bruce Wilson and Roger Woock, "Education, Work. and Global Change", in Lestre Bash and Andy Green, ed., World Year Book of Education, 199- 5: Youth Education and Work (London: Kogan Page, 1995).
7 Franco Ferrarotti, "The Birth of a Counter-culture: From Kropotkin to Sakharov", in Federico Mayor and Augusto Forti, ed., Science and Power (Paris: UNESCO, 1995), p.97.
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social arena is cultural or social solipsism. To go to other extremes and to reduce every issue to a matter of rates on investment or to one of legal rights is solipsism of a different kind, but solipsism all the same. Public policy has to be necessarily eclectic and reconcile different interests and rationalities.
A democratic polity is inconceivable without organised groups jockeying for power, likewise efficient and. effective decision-making requires competition among different advocacy groups. By bringing out in sharp relief the different faces of an issue, these groups expand the limits of bounded rationality and contribute to informed decision- making. These advocacy groups need not be only interest groups striving to secure material gains; these can as well be groups or organizations seeking further their versions of rationality. Markets for ideas are not less utilitarian than markets for goods and services. For this point of view what is often perceived as redundancy has utility. Multiple departments of government seemingly working at cross purposes8 may be akin to firms jostling for a larger market share for their brands of a product; waste may be associated with competition but that waste has to be set off against efficiency gains,
In the international arena, multilateral agencies like UNESCO, UNICEF and UNDP on the one, hand and the Bretton Woods institutions on the other have been functioning as counterpoints; the combination of their contrasting world views has enriched the rhythm of development. If monotony is to be avoided in the "Age of Markets" the importance of non-economic counterpoints cannot be emphasised enough.
8 Friedman spoke of some government employees working in one massive building in Washington full-time trying to devise and implement plans to spend our money to discourage us from smoking cigarettes and of other employees in another building, working full-time spending money to subsidize farmers to grow tobacco. Hard cases make bad law. See Friedman Milton and Friedman Rose, Free to Choose, (London: Secker and Warburg, 1980).
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III
Following its ethical mission of building defences of peace in the minds of men, there have been two major strands in UNESCO's endeavour in the area of education. In modern terminology, the first goes by the rubric of Education for Peace and Culture of Peace and. the second by Basic Education. The former encompasses all those activities which, through education and culture,, promote an active sense of tolerance, mutual understanding and universal respect for human rights.
UNESCO's advocacy of basic education is an offshoot of its Concern for promotion of peace. Right in the First General Conference, in 1946, the delegates adopted the proposals of the Preparatory Commission to promote, Fundamental Education (the precursor of Basic Education).
The Preparatory Commission suggested that:
The organisation should launch, upon a world scale, an attack upon ignorance, by helping all Member States who desire such help to establish a minimum Fundamental Education for all their citizens....The present educational inequality between nations represents a danger to the peace of the world which cannot become one if half of it remains illiterate.9
Fundamental Education was a many-sided undertaking ranging from primary education to work with adult literates. By 1950 the approach was settled; Fundamental Education was intended for those children as well as adults who have, not received or completed the whole period of their primary education. Fundamental Education sought to provide the minimum knowledge and skills essential to understand the problems of their immediate environment and their rights and duties as citizens and individuals, and to participate more effectively in the
9 Jones W. Phillip, International Policy for the Third World Education: UNESCO, Literacy and Development (London: Routledge, 1988), pp.54-55.
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economic and social phases of their community. It had significant social nature in that it sought to use active methods of learning and community involvement. The World Conference on Education For All held in Jomtien in March 1990 (Jomtien Conference), called for the basic learning needs of all children, youth and adults being met through a variety of delivery systems. Even in the post-Jomtien era, there is still considerable scepticism in the international development community about literacy and alternative education programmes, and often encounters the monistic fixation about school as the only mode of delivery notwithstanding, the actuality of the school being not able to reach millions of children in developing countries. No doubt the effectiveness and efficiency of many of these programmes, particularly on scale, leaves much to be desired. But the right approach is to try to improve the efficiency and effectiveness rather than, ostrich-like, skirt the problem. Against this background the abiding faith of UNESCO in the cause of universal literacy is indeed touching.
Along with literacy UNESCO strove for Universalisation of Elementary Education (UEE). In this endeavour the Asia-Pacific region led the way by developing the Karachi Plan to universalise elementary education by 1980. The reminiscences of a participant, in the meeting, which formulated the Karachi Plan, have a contemporaneous tone and capture the mood of participants in later events like the Jomtien Conference and the Delhi Education for All Summit of Nine High Population Countries in December 1993.
Thus, in 1959, I found myself in Karachi, Pakistan, representing my country in a 15-member meeting on. Primary Education in Asia. I was already a mature hand in UNESCO affairs -- senior enough to be elected the Chairman of one of the two Sub-Commissions. I recall this meeting not only for its final product, the much- discussed Karachi Plan for Free and Compulsory Primary Education in Asia but, more so, for the rude shocks to which all participants were subjected as data on enrolments, attendance, teacher-pupil ratios, teacher quality and average catchment areas of schools for each country were presented with such convincing concern by
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J.P. Naik and Shamshul Haq (two of the greatest educators to be produced in recent times in the Indian Sub-Continent). It was, to say the least, a dismal and utterly discouraging picture. The figures seemed to say everything. They explained our poverty, our backwardness and our shameful complacence. To a crowd of government officials who hung their heads in genuine shame, Malcolm Adiseshiah, the young and energetic representative of UNESCO's Director-General, whose enthusiastic optimism has been infectious as his ever- present smile, spoke of the progress in Disarmament Talks in Geneva and the prospects of endless resources unleashed by disarmament to educational development. Thus encouraged, we approved the Karachi Plan with its twenty-year target (1960-1980) and moved resolutions requesting UNESCO's presence in Asia and regional centers in specified fields. We underscored the need to get our Ministers to commit. `Get them to sign up their will to act', we said. I flew back to Colombo with the satisfaction that something big and important started in Karachi and that I was privileged to be a part of it. But I could not have, at that moment, visualised either how big it was going to be or how much of the best years of my life would be dedicated to this dream. The dream of universal free education of at least seven years in Asia, of course, appeared to be real and realizable.10
In this `Age of the Washington Consensus',*11 in which Primary Education is universally
accepted to be a public expenditure priority, it is difficult to visualise an era in which UNESCO's
10 W. P. Ananda Guruge, "Growing Up in UNESCO - with ROEAP" in "UNESCO in Asia and Pacific: 40 Years on" Bulletin of the UNESCO Regional Office for Education in Asia and the Pacific, no.27, November 1986, p.20.
11*Washington Consensus is a phrase coined by John Williamson. As Paul Krugman puts it, by `Washington' Williamson meant "not only the US government but also all those institutions and networks of opinion leaders centred in the world's de facto capital - the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, think tanks, particularly sophisticated investment bankers mid world finance ministers, all those who meet each other in Washington and collectively define the conventional wisdom of the moment. One of the ten aspects of the "Washington Consensus" advocates primary education as a public expenditure priority.
Public Expenditure Priorities: Policy reform consists in redirecting expenditure from politically sensitive areas which typically receive more resources than their economic returns can justify, like administration, defence indiscriminate subsidies, and white elephants toward neglected fields with high economic returns and the potential to improve income distribution, like primary health and education, and infrastructure.