Towards real mutual tolerance.

• Author: Matsuura, Koichiro
• Position: Mission Statement - UNESCO's role

The purpose of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cu1tural 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 wellbeing; and culture to instill a deeper, wiser understanding of the best, not the worst, in universal human achievement.

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...