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“All international conferences are, in more than one way, The Clearing House of different ideas and different perceptions about the issues at stake. We come here to articulate our different national positions, our achievements and our hopes. But more than this, we assemble here to strike a common ground. We come here to rediscover and reaffirm our common human destiny, which contains and absorbs all our differences.
Because of the very nature of its original principle, UNESCO more than any other such common endeavour, keeps us focussed on the very best of our traditions and the most exalted of our hopes for humanity. The international conference on education is, about the very best of what we are capable of. While helping each individual and nation to fulfil herself, education binds us together in shaping human history.
It is, indeed, in this perspective, that our efforts today will be judged by history as heroic, feeble or indifferent.
But we must at the same time also understand that while, ideally, and potentially, education can unite us, it could also exacerbate our differences. All our societies and the world as it is organised today have many fault lines. Education can be an instrument of repairing these fault lines or making them into wider chasms. It can promote divisiveness along these fault lines.
The divisiveness comes because of the disparities in access, the myopic vision of those at the helm of educational policies and the perverse ideologies that from time to time run amuck among societies.
The increasing commodification of education poses another divisive force, in as much as people have access to the level and quality of education, according to their capacity to pay. Everyone may have access to education but of a different order and quality. It cannot promote unity. Ignorances can be perhaps coped with but differentials in education can produce terrible ideas, as unfortunately, they are in several societies. It is, therefore, imperative that we strive towards, within the country certainly, and globally, if possible, a common school system – common not in the sense of transacting the same curriculum but in terms of access to equal teaching and learning resources. We in India are policy bound to work towards a common school system but are finding it not too easy to work towards that. A global initiative on this can help us all. I think this is an idea whose time has come and all our collective wisdom should try to address this.
Most of our societies are or becoming multi-cultural. Therefore, one kind of education, particularly, at the school level is becoming an obsolete idea. We have to enlarge the areas of textual and contextual freedoms that schools enjoy -–particularly of those belonging to minority groups. A tolerance for diversity must be the cornerstone of our educational edifice. It is natural, therefore, that multiplicity of texts is going to be the order of the day. However, there is always a question of auditing these texts from national and even human rights perspective. It is a new kind of challenge that we must increasingly try to resolve to promote autonomy and freedom at all levels and yet keep a gently but keen eye on these autonomies, so that they are not hijacked by people with ulterior motives or by the ideologies of hatred and divisiveness. We are up against such a challenge in India and the next few years will be critical for us to come on tope of this. Whether aware of this or not, I suspect many other societies are subjected to the same challenges. It will, therefore, be worthwhile to develop common understanding and strategies to meet this.
One last point I would like to make is that education is not only about principles including the ones I mentioned. In real terms, it means educational infrastructure, teachers, textbooks and all other tings that go to make up a decent school. All these need resources. If education is on which everyone agrees, it has to be the first charge on our national resources. We have made a beginning towards this in India and we do hope that we will redeem all pledges that we have made in the National Common Minimum Programme of our Government. Indeed, they are the pledges we made in the making of our nation, in our freedom struggle and in our Constitution. They give substance and shape to what our beloved leader and the first Prime Minister of India Jawaharlal Nehru described, on the eve of our independence, as “our tryst with destiny”. Each of our societies has to redeem the same pledge, may be formulated and articulated differently . If I may say so, that is what our common human destiny and UNESCO is all about. I will urge you all to lend your powerful voices in articulating this thought and taking it across the continents.”
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