The General Conference

The General Conference of UNESCO is a remarkable phenomenon. It strikes the newcomer as a strange and expensiveway to govern any organization –even an international one. The total cost of the three-week event, not to mention the preceding meeting of the Executive Board, must run into thousands of dollars. Now that the Secretariat –UNESCO’s management structure– is subject to a thoroughgoing reform there is a compelling case for a parallel reform of the governance structure.

The recent General Conference was the first major UN-system gathering to take place on schedule after the shocks of 11 September. Some predicted that attendance would be decimated but the opposite occurred. Both the overall attendance (some 3,000 people who registered for some or all of the Conference) and the presence of over 200 government ministers established new records. One sensed that the international community needed this event as a catharsis to help it adjust to a changed world. Nearly every speaker at the plenary session presented condolences to the United States and condemned terrorism. The countries with a history of terrorism denounced it with the greatest energy.

Learning to live together
A few days before the attacks of 11 September, the International Conference on Education was held by UNESCO’s International Bureau for Education in Geneva on the theme of Learning to Live Together. Some eighty ministers of education had attended that gathering and they made frequent reference to its work and conclusions in their interventions to the General Conference. Suddenly, UNESCO’s constitution and its years of work on educating for peace and tolerance took on a very contemporary allure.

Before these two conferences took place it had seemed to me that the concerns of education ministers had come to relate mainly to the performance of pupils in individual tests of achievement. Any comparative reports of test scores between countries would be sure to provoke a lively discussion at ministerial meetings. However, during these conferences much more was heard about education for living together. A consensus emerged that an education of quality must promote both individual achievement and cohesive communities. As sociologists would say, there must be a balance of attention to the creation of human capital and social capital.

New programme
Thanks to good preparatory work on our Medium-Term Strategy and our Programme –and to the excellent chairmanship of Professor Michael Omolewa– Commission II finished its work on time in a very constructive spirit. Since then colleagues in the field, in the Institutes and at Headquarters have been putting the final touches to their workplans for the coming biennium. I believe that we now have a very relevant and well-targeted programme and I look forward to supporting colleagues as we all strive to deliver the results we have promised.

One early task must be to rewrite our programme in clear and simple language. It is an exciting programme and we need now to present it to the world in a way that communicates our own enthusiasm for the important tasks ahead.

Assistant Director-General for Education.

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