UNESCO. General Conference; 30th; Records ... - unesdoc - Unesco

8.9 Over the years we have privileged an analytical approach to problem identification and resolution and in
this logic we have often focused on parts as opposed to the whole. The time has come for educational policymakers
to reconstitute the whole from the part because most of the problems we are likely to face in the coming
centuries will be multidimensional, requiring an integrated intellectual approach rather than a fragmented one.
Maybe it is appropriate here to quote Pascal: "Toutes choses étant causées et causantes, aidées et aidantes,
médiates et immédiates, et toutes s’entretenant par un lien naturel et insensible qui lie les plus éloignées et les
plus différentes, je tiens impossible de connaître les parties sans connaître le tout, non plus que de connaître le
tout sans connaître particulièrement les parties".
8.10 The reconfiguration of knowledge in its composite dimension is another challenge which UNESCO will
have to face. Consistent with the opening proviso of the UNESCO Constitution that as "wars begin in the minds
of men, peace must be constructed in the minds of men", a culture of peace has been the guiding aim of the
Organization throughout its existence. And yet we know that we are far from attaining this objective. The search
for peace will have to be a permanent endeavour. It cannot succeed by a mechanical or an institutional approach
alone. It is imperative for us to transform minds, which can only be achieved by transforming mindsets. We are
aware of the tremendous progress made in science and technology. We also know that such progress has a huge
impact on world society, but a lopsided impact. Dereliction and decay, along with abject poverty, prevail among
a majority of the world population. We have yet to grapple with the problem of environmental degradation. We
are helpless before the destruction wreaked by the ozone layer and the El Niño phenomenon. The spectre of
demographic explosion looms. The time has come for a rebalancing of our efforts: a culture of humanity, as a
prelude to world peace, must be treated with the same consideration as a culture of science and technology.
History, literature, geography, music, the arts … and multiculturalism must inform the new humanity.
8.11 Madam President, from the creation of the alphabet to the digitization of information, culture and, by
extension, education have underpinned all transformations of society. Cultural studies have to do with the
people’s awareness of themselves and of their potentialities. As long as cultural studies look up to or look back to
the past for its own sake, they will make the common man feel guilty and incapable of managing the present.
Paolo Freire’s philosophy of education is the philosophy of man’s vocation to be more - more, that is, than what
he is at any given time and place. His educational philosophy was based on a cultural vision. What was that
vision? That the characteristic of the human species is its repeatedly demonstrated capacity to transcend what is
merely given, what is purely determined, to reconstitute tradition as a bedrock of modernity. Mahatma Gandhi
warned against education and culture enslaved by the market economy and against equating modernization with
markets and technology.
8.12 At a time when everywhere there is an urge to celebrate multiculturalism, what should be the philosophy
of the new humanities? It is to liberate the energies of people as they live life today as opposed to making people
worship the past as though the past was the only truth. Tomorrow is our destiny. Such a diversity of cultures as
ours must make us recognize the dichotomy between the historical/anthropological and the existential. We need
to focus on the conscious, the sub-conscious … and the unconscious. Cultural studies must serve the present and
the future. Perhaps the challenge we face today is to abandon an outdated concept of society based on man’s
acquisitive greed to start laying the foundations of a new society. We must liberate the hombre novo, the new
man, that Che Guevara died for. In the wake of this quest, the need to mould a new philosophy of education
becomes an imperative.
8.13 In fact, I find in the realization of individual emancipation an ingredient of World Unity: the individual
must become a prototype of the world. When William Butler Yeats asked Rabindranath Tagore to translate the
Gitanjali into English, he wanted the Indian Guru to blend the Specific and the Universal. Today, the challenge of
globalization is not just an economic challenge. It is a challenge of culture. The individual who is swept off his
feet by a global culture while forgetting his own culture is lost.
8.14 Tomorrow’s battle will not be only one of markets and economics. Both communism and capitalism
have failed to reconcile the self-interest seeker and the social being in each person. We forget that the victor has
to be not the country, or the region, but man, the individual. Our mission must be to build up men not people; the
nations will take care of themselves. We must remind ourselves that the culture of peace has always constituted
the very purpose of our existence, and for peace to become an absolute reality we must harness all our efforts to
make war against war, environmental disaster, demographic explosion, abject poverty, squalor and dereliction,
the unethical exploitation of scientific discoveries and uneven sharing of the fruits of technology, the abuse and
exploitation of human dignity.
8.15 Madam President, dear friends, if we want to transform world society, we must transform the mind and
reach for the unreachable. Our agenda must be education, in its mental, physical and spiritual dimensions,
education for a culture of peace based on the acquisition of an integrated knowledge as a reflection of parcelized
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