TOWARDS LIFELONG EDUCATION FOR ALL — HIGHER EDUCATION AND SOCIETAL DEVELOPMENT
 1966Meeting on Higher Education and Development, San José
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ORIGINS AND OBJECTIVES The development of higher education and the promotion of research and sciences (1) through international co-operation have been major fields of action for UNESCO since 1946. As the specialized United Nations Agency for Education, Science, Culture and Communication, UNESCO had its origins in the spirit of solidarity prevailing within the intellectual and scientific communities at the end of the Second World War. Various higher education institutions, particularly the universities, played a leading role in building up that co-operative effort. Moreover, through their functions in teaching, training, research and service to the community, higher education institutions cover the very areas which fall within the competence of UNESCO and are therefore among its major partners. (2) Over the years, UNESCO’s action in higher education has maintained high priority. Since 1948 – when, in collaboration with the Government of the Netherlands a preparatory conference of representatives of universities was held in Utrecht, leading in 1950 to the creation of the International Association of Universities (3) – UNESCO’s programme has included various projects in the field of higher education. Technology advance, the infrastructure of economic development, rapid modification of social structures and the widening spectrum of human knowledge were all reflected in demands made on university institutions by modern society. Reform and development of national provision for higher education and fundamental research are among problems accorded high priority, first of all in developed countries. In the 1960s, UNESCO paid special attention to developing countries in this regard and to the role that institutes of higher education can play in their economic, social and cultural development. Advisory missions were sent to Brazil, Burundi, Cameroon, Central American republics, Chile, Nigeria, Somalia, etc., to advise either on the creation of new universities or on the reorganization of existing ones. To identify some of the problems of higher education worldwide, (4) and to facilitate their solution, UNESCO promoted a broad exchange of views. Regional conferences were held on the development of higher education in Africa (Tananarive, 1962), (5) and in Europe Vienna, 1967, Bucharest, 1973), while for Latin America and the Caribbean, specialists in higher education met in San José, Costa Rica, in 1966. Three main objectives were pursued during this period, and still maintain their validity: |
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UNIVERSITIES MUST NOT BE MERE MUSEUMS OF THOUGHT... by Jaime Torres Bodet
For its main discussion last month, the Conference chose the theme of the mission
of universities in the modern world, the opening speakers being Bernardo Houssay,
the Argentine physiologist and Nobel prize winner; George Zook, the American
historian and president of the American Council on Education; and Pierre Auger,
the French physicist and head of UNESCO’s Natural Sciences Department.
Addressing the Conference at its opening session, Jaime Torres Bodet, UNESCO’s
Director-General, congratulated the delegates on their choice of this subject
for debate.
‘There is little likelihood of the various dogmatisms of today allowing the
universities to become sanctuaries isolated from the upheavals of the outer
worlds,’ he said. […] ‘I am not proposing that the separate domains of politics
and universities should in the smallest degree be merged or confused […] it is
essential that universities should hold aloof both from party strife and from the
official ideologies, that they jealously guard their independence and their
serenity. But independence does not mean indifference.’
The gap between scientific and everyday knowledge is growing ever wider. What the
scientist describes is less and less at the level of being at which we live.
For the university to train scholars and specialists is very well, but it must not
so confine them to their own subjects as to leave them helpless before the general
problems presented to all our consciences by a world of which we have
scarcely yet begun the material organization.
Universities must not be mere museums of thought. The object of research
laboratories, of enquiries and studies, of card indexes of libraries and
private scholars, is of course to aid the advance of science – but also to
promote the progress of man and of society.
Address to the Conference founding the International |
FOOTNOTES:
(2) Very early on UNESCO provided technical assistance to Member States to help them establish universities or institutes of higher education, for instance, in 1951-1952, assistance was extended to the University of Baghdad, to Liberia College, to the University of Port-Vejo (Ecuador) and to the Institutes of Technology in Kharagpour and Bombay in India. As soon as the United Nations Special Fund had been set up it provided substantial support to, for example, the Polytechnic College in Tehran, to the Latin-American Faculty of Social Sciences in Santiago, Chile.
(3) The first attempts to set up a worldwide university organization were made by the League of Nations. In 1947, at the Third Session of its General Conference, UNESCO decided to call a preparatory conference of university representatives at Utrecht, in August 1948, with a view to establishing an international university organization. In the same year, the International Universities Bureau (IUB) was created, financed by UNESCO and established at its Headquarters. It had a twofold purpose: first, to build up, in close co-operation with the technical services of UNESCO, a university information centre; and, second, to prepare the International Conference of Universities in Nice, 1950, where the Association was founded under the auspices of UNESCO and the United Nations. At the same time, IUB was placed under the authority of the Association. The interdisciplinary nature of UNESCO’s activities in the sphere of higher education is characterized especially by its support to the International Association of Universities. This was how, for example, in 1958, the IUB distributed a worldwide index of schools of medicine, another of higher institutes of agronomy, and a list of university research institutes involved in the Major Project for Mutual Appreciation of the Values of the East and the West.
(4) In 1960, on the occasion of the Second World Conference on Adult Education held in Montreal, thirty-five personalities of fourteen different nationalities met at the Sagamore Centre, University College of Syracuse (New York) to investigate the roles incumbent upon universities in various spheres of adult education: technical and vocational training, civic education, preparation for civic responsibilities, general education and humanism. This meeting provided an occasion to examine a wide variety of activities foreshadowing the modalities of lifelong education as they would be advocated by UNESCO in the ensuing decades. The meeting also fell within the purview according to which higher education establishments should serve as centres for lifelong education accessible to all, at any time.
(5) The Conference on the Development of Higher Education in Africa, held in Tananarive, Madagascar, from 3 to 12 September 1962 was convened to:
1. identify possible solutions to
(i) problems of choice and
adaptation of the higher education curriculum to the specific conditions of
African life and development, and the training of specialized personnel for
public administration and economic development techniques;
(ii) problems of administration, organization, structure
and financing encountered in the creation or development
of institutions of higher education both from the point of
view of the institutions themselves and from the wider angle of national policy.
2. provide data to the United Nations, its Specialized Agencies, and to other
organizations and bodies concerned with international
co-operation and assistance, for the development of
their programmes in aid to and use of institutions of higher
education in Africa.
Caption: UNESCO Pilot Project for the Teaching of Sciences in Asia: producing a Science teaching film, Bangkok, 1967.
