On November 4, 1946, the constitution of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization came into force, a year after it had been signed in London, when the twentieth state had accepted it, and the first director general was the British biologist Julian Huxley, who took up the post in the weeks that followed. The idea was not new. The League of Nations had run a committee on intellectual cooperation between the wars, and a wartime conference of allied ministers of education in London had kept the plan alive while the fighting was still going on.
The founders argued that a war begins in the minds of people and that peace therefore has to be built in schools and libraries and laboratories as well as at conference tables, and the constitution says that the wide spread of culture and of education is a duty that all states share. The wording was careful. Its first campaigns were to rebuild schools and libraries in Europe and to attack the illiteracy the war had left behind, and it sent experts and books and equipment to countries that had lost both.
The organisation has since worked on primary schooling and on the training of teachers, on the protection of monuments and of sites, and on the free flow of scientific information, and it keeps a register of places of world importance that are to be protected in war and repaired after it. The register is long. It has also been the subject of political quarrels, for member states have argued over resolutions and over the admission of new members, and two countries left it at different times and later returned.
Its work is carried out through offices in many countries and through national commissions, and it runs programmes on water and on the oceans and on the ethics of new technology, and it sets standards that governments are asked to follow. The money is short. The budget is small in relation to the task, and much of the work depends on the willingness of states to carry out what they have agreed, and the argument about whether the body does enough has run for as long as it has existed.