Ten years of Unesco: 1946-1956

Whether humanity has progressed or not since the end of the last war is a question bothers few people. Most of us are quite happy to note merely that we have survived. Others again, without very good reason, think progress a matter of course and like to consider that if humanity scored, for example, 12 marks at any given moment, it deserves 14 or 15 marks a decade later. But do they ever stop to define the basis of such an evaluation, or to explain the total out of which the marks have been given ?

There is, in truth, no universally acceptable measure of progress. Nobody believes that men become more handsome or wiser over the years, and nobody can tell whether they are becoming happier. Increases in comforts can be lightly dismissed as irrelevant in this context. Only one kind of progress seems incontrovertible : the increase in the fund of knowledge, either as discovered by research, or as acquired through education. Knowledge alone will permit humanity to advance gradually-or perhaps at an accelerated pace-in areas that still appear to remain stagnant and that still appear to be closed to it : along the paths of justice, of peace and of intelligence.

UNESCO is an"Organization for education, science and culture"which happens to have been founded just ten years ago. One may therefore appropriately enquire, at this point, what it has achieved so far. Have education, science and culture gone ahead during the past decade ?

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