NO ROWS MARRED UNESCO MEETING

New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 349, 1 March 1946, Page 14

NO ROWS MARRED UNESCO MEETING

Good Conference That Had a Poor Press

was a deputy-leader of New Zealand’s Delegation to the international conference held in London last November to establish a United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organisation, has just returned to Wellington, and The Listener called on him on his first day back at work in the offices of the Council for Educational Research. We found that he was glad to talk at once about the eonference, because he felt it had had a bad press in London (apart from some well-informed articles in The Times), and not much publicity elsewhere. CAMPBELL, who "Do you mind if I start by going over its origins?" he said. "Its origins were several, but partly in the San Francisco conference-there was general agreement there about the need for something of the kind, and Paragraph 3 of Article 1 in the Charter carries a general reference to it. But before that there were the meetings during the war of Allied Ministers of Education, convened by the British Minister, R. A. Butler, and some of the seeds of the idea were sown then. "A Breath of Hope" "Our job at the conference was simply to frame a constitution for an organisation; not to go into details of organisation or possible duties. We did this, in something less than the time we thought it weuld take-about a fortnight. alto-gether-and we did it smoothly and pleasantly. A lot of people who had had previous experience of international conferences said it was the pleasantest they had ever attended. Leon Blum said he felt there was a breath of hope in the atmosphere." "Blum was there?" "Yes; Ellen Wilkinson, the British Minister of Education, was our president, and Leon Blum was associate president. He made avery impressive speech at the opening-I thought he looked very well, and he spoke with great force. "There were 44 nations represented, some only by observers. The Russians didn’t send anyone. And there were about 300 people altogether, including technical advisers and secretaries. The Americans sent a very strong delegation, about 40 people all told-that includes secretaries and couriers and so on-~and Archibald MacLeish was their feader. Harlow Shapley, a very famous astronomer, was another of their party. They were almost a conference in themselves; they had their own committees going all the time. Britain was represented mainly by Ministry of Education and Foreign Office officials, and Gilbert Murray was there as an observer. The countries were seated in alphabetical order, so we were next to the Norwegians and saw quite a lot of them. "Who made up your party in the end?" : =A Small ‘Team "Well, ‘Beebyy.. as you know, couldn’t go en the last moment, so there . 9 eevee ®

was Dr. R. M. Campbell at the head; Captain W. W. Mason, who used to be a teacher in the Hutt Valley; Miss Lorna McPhee, of the High Commissioner’s Office; Lt.-Col. W. E. Alexander, of A.E.W.S., Fit.-Lt. A. C. Arneson, and myself. We were a small team, but we managed to see that New Zealand was represented at all the committees, Mr. Campbell said that he went without knowing what the feeling of the conference would be, and not expecting too much. But he found what he now feels justified in calling a "genuine and widespread desire for something like UNESCO; a real conviction among the countries of the need for it." "Particularly for the countries that had been occupied during the war, and cut off so long from the rest, it was a big thing," he said. "You could see that they felt the need desperately. And the same for the countries with special problems, such as mass illiteracy. India and China were both represented. "There were some pgople with fascinating stories to tell, but it was rather tantalising-we were too busy all the time to get to know each other really well. There was Hu Shih, of the University of Peking, who has done a tremendous job adapting the classical written Chinese to the vernacular-I hope I’ve got that right, I don’t know anything about Chinese-and then there was the former Mexican Minister of Education, who was responsible for passing a law in Mexico to compel every literate person to teach one illiterate person; and so on-people with extraordinarily interesting backgrounds. But we were so busy that we had to have, for instance, firstrank philosophers deciding whether there’d be 15 men on a committee or 16, and things like that, things that just had to be done. ~ How It Will Work "However, I suppose you want me to tell you what we decided, and what the s upshot of it all is. Well, the Constitution provides that there is to be a general conference once a year, attended by not more than five persons from each member-State. There’s to be an executive

board of 18 members elected by the conference from the delegates, which will meet twice a year, and a Director-Gen-eral and Permanent Secretariat in the UNESCO headquarters. They’re to be in Paris. So the pattern of the thing is rather similar to the International Labour Office. "But it differs from the corresponding attempt made after the last war, the ‘International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation of the League of Nations,’ in two ways. First, in its representative character. (Ellen Wilkinson used the phrase, though I wouldn’t use it myself, ‘an Educational Parliament of the World.’) And second, in that it is directly concerned with education as such, in the schools, which was expressly excluded from the other show, the ‘International, etc.’ " "And what is its status in relation to the United Nations Organisation?" "Article X of the Constitution covers that. UNESCO will be one of the ‘specialised agencies’ referred to in the San Francisco Charter, and there will be an agreement, subject to the approval of the UNESCO -general conference, to fix (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) the relationship with UN. The agreement is to provide for ‘effective cooperation’ between the two, and at the same time recognise UNESCO's autonomy. Of course UNESCO will be dependent on UN for its money, but all the same I think it will be something more than just a commission of UN, and effectively autonomous." vos Practical Ways "What about the practical side? You’ve told us how the administration will work; can you say yet what UNESCO will be able: to do, in practical terms, for the countries that hope to benefit-includ-ing New Zealand?" "I think myself that when it ‘gets going-which will be soon-it will work in five or six divisions: (1) Schooling; (2) literature, journals and so on; (3) the arts; (4) social studies; (5) the natural sciences; (6) what we call for want of a better: name ‘mass _media’ — radio, cinema, and. the press. Each agency will have a strong information section. "And these are some of the practical ways in which I think it will be able to make itself useful: "It could provide technical advisers to countries with special problems (illiteracy, for instance); it could produce some sort of arinual world survey of education; it could ‘set up an international library of educational works, films, visual aids, and. so on; it could arrange the interchange of personnel; and it could make possible the circulating of exhibits of arts, crafts, and science, which are very expensive to make in the original, but can be copied cheaply if only someone stands the cost of the first part. "The preparatory commission, with its secretariat, is now at work in "London. The plan has to be ratified by 20 nations, and as‘soon as that’s done, the organisation will move over. to Paris and set itself up permanently. I think a tremendous. amount depends on the secre‘tariat. But if they get really good people, I think that without being Utopian, we can say the organisation’s going to be very useful." Perhaps Here Some Day "One or two points while I remember: the location of the General Conference

moves from year to year. It doesn’t have to go right round everyone in turn, only it can’t be in the same place two years running. This means that if they find that one place has special advantages they can go back to it in two years. And I think we might see one conference down in this part of the world-in Sydney at any rate, some time in the next. ten years or so. One proposal that has been made, and thought well of, is that in the year in which a conference is set down to meet.in one country, there should be a UNESCO month -in. that country just before, with all sorts of activities helped along by the Government, displays, music festivals, and so on, and the delegates could come early and see this and get to know each other before the business begins. Not a Relief Agency "Another thing: the question of aid to devastated countries. It was a difficult issue. On the one hand it was felt that UNESCO must avoid becoming just another relief agency and getting diverted from its main purpose. Yet on the other hand many countries, particularly those that were very badly knocked about, will judge UNESCO by its ability to meet their immediate needs. In some Cases, for instance, even the basic simple necessities are missing-even pencils and paper. So the conference’s solution for this problem was to set up a Technical sub-committee of the Preparatory Commission to survey the needs of the devastated countries, and when it has satisfied itself about their needs, it can bring them to the notice of Governments, organisations, and individuals who are willing to help."