Just for a moment...
Just for a moment...
Let's take a moment - but not longer - to pity frightened men. Then let us plan and work to dispel their fear and bring them into our purposeful society of the makers of things and the architects of human peace and progress. This is what we must do, to save them and to save ourselves from the consequences of their fear and folly. \vie must learn to recognize and know them.
They can be recognized to-day by their words. To-day, as before, they attack the very heart of education and of science, by saying that everything is already known. Among the things they "know" so well are these :
Hunger and despair are and must he the common lot of most of the each's people (just as their forebears said, before the days of deep freezers, curing or meat and hybrid corn). War is an incurable trait of human nature (just as it was once human nature for some to he slaves and others to be masters). Science is cvil (as labour-saying machinery was once considered evil). Universal education is wrong because educated men will no longer "know their place" (as the Renaissance proved).
Yet in defiance of all the tiling that once were "known", the experiments have been made. with lire, water, wood. iron and the "indestructible" atom itself - and we have the trains, ships, printing presses and medicinal isotopes to prove it. The challenges have been made and the victories have been counted in every field of human endeavour-because courage itseif is a common element in human nature.
On this page is illustrated one of the most dramatic demonstrations of human determination - for thcre is one place which is the most natural home for fear. That place is the world of perpetual darkness and sotitude. inhabilated by the blind. If this is not terrifying. and if this does not justify fatalism and surrender - what is there for man to fear?
Once, unbroken loneliness. ignorance and dependence were the common lot of those who could not see. Now, the bravest among them have defealed darkness. Working in full partnership with their sighted colleagues, in UNESCO meeting rooms, and in thousands of places throughout the world, they are helping all handicapped men. women and childre 10 take the place so long reserved for them in our society.
UNESCO knows many of the courageous men and women, in the broad fields of education. science and culture, and has helped bring them together in thousands of meeting, to plan and carry forward co-operative work - of the kind exemplified on this page.
To study progress reports on such work, and to make plans for the future, UNESCO will open its Fifth on the 22nd of May. Before then, UNESCO will have sponsored meetings on such projects as these:
To speed the reconstruction of schools: to encourage the international dissemination of music: to provide for the increased interchange among nations of workers, teachers and students: to help solve the educational problems of physically handicapped children: 10 open a fundamental education centre in Mexico to serve the whole of Latin America: to increase the international availability of educational, scientific and cultural materials: to help doctors, chemists and engineers to learn quickly of the work of their colleagues in other countries... and to accomplish other work that there is no space to list.
These are among the indispensable elements for the practical attainment of a better world.