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Round Table: Dialogue among Civilizations United Nations, New York, 5 September 2000 Provisional verbatim transcription

Address by Hans van Ginkel (Netherlands)

Mr. Van Gingel: Is information technology helpful? Yes. Is it in itself enough? No. The United Nations University has two projects, one in Tokyo, about the universal networking language, and in a way it is more or less cooperating with the European automatic translation programmes. But we still have a long way to go before it is possible for someone in China to put something on to his computer in Chinese and in Saudi Arabia someone will get it out in Arabic.

The second project is in Macau and is about script. In one language sometimes one writes from top to bottom but in another language it goes from right to left. So how does one get it printed properly. These projects are important and progress is being made, but still there is a long way to go. When we look at this kind of international culture a difference should be made between an international culture having elements of very different cultures and cultural diversity. These are different concepts. Cultural diversity in itself is a cohesive culture in different places differing from each other. That is different from one homogeneous international culture.

On the topic of education I should like to make the following remark. In Europe the school programmes were developed in the nineteenth century in relation to the building up of the nation-State. So geography, history, social science always got a role to socialize young people into the nation, to make them able or prepared to die for the country. In a way in many of the newly independent countries more or less the same was repeated but using their own circumstances. We must make it clear that the world community of peoples in the twenty-first century is asking for a different type of pedagogy, and that is a major project.

Mr. Picco: Dr. Yakovlev.

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