The United Nations Organization for Education, Science and Culture - UNESCO – was created in 1945, in the same context and jointly with the United Nations (UN). Its objective, as a global entity, is “to secure peace through intellectual cooperation among nations”. The creator and first president of UNESCO it was the biologist JulianHuxley, brother of the writer Aldouls Huxley.
The context of the creation of Unesco, that is, the end of World War II, it demanded a new form of mediation between the powers that emerged from the war and the countries that had been ruined by the conflict. One of the strategies designed for this mediation was the intellectual intertwining between the most diverse nations so that problems of a cultural or scientific nature would no longer result in military conflicts, as happened in World War II World.
One of the most striking features of the Nazism, before and during World War II, were the racism and cultural superiority policy of the Aryan race. To quell any return to this nefarious ideology, the UNESCO started to organize, in the 1940s, several congresses with researchers from all over the world to demonstrate that the concept of race was more complex than the racists of previous decades and that each nation had a cultural wealth that was closely associated with the interaction between ethnic groups (or races), and not their segregation.
A symposium on the concept of democracy it was also organized in 1949 by Unesco. The objective was to rethink this concept based on the catastrophic experience of totalitarian regimes, such as the Nazism, Fascism and Stalinism, which also claimed for themselves the status of “democracy” as a took effect.
Other issues, such as education aimed at citizenship, the eradication of illiteracy, the position against prejudices of race, color, gender or culture, are led by Unesco and brought to discussion in all countries that are integrated to it - more than 190 in total - through educational policies and projects political-pedagogical. Since then, the undertaking of this international entity has focused on these issues and generated discussions that are always reflected in practical actions with a global reach.
*Image credits: Shutterstock and Claudine Van Messenhove
By Me. Cláudio Fernandes
