UNESCO Education Position Paper (2003)

In 2003, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), a branch of the United Nations that since its inception has spoken aggressively and specifically, although not exclusively, to how best to safeguard the civil rights and liberties of children regardless of national origins or specific circumstances (war, drought, political oppression), released a much publicized and sweeping position paper that sought to address specifically the growing problem with illiteracy among children under the age of 18 and how to preserve centrally the rights of children to education through the preservation of access to language skills. Targeting illiteracy—much as in the past UNESCO blue-ribbon panels and subsequent position papers had addressed issues ranging from hunger and malnutrition to child labor conditions and the status of children refugees to the alarming drop in the number of qualified teachers in third world countries—the position paper, the product of more than two years of data gathering by a range of international linguistics experts, sociologists, anthropologists, and cultural historians, declared that access to meaningful and consistently presented education, particularly in the ages between 3 and 18, was the primary function of language itself and that illiteracy created significant problems later for nations unwilling to address linguistic civil rights early on in areas including employment incompetency, the creation of a permanent poverty class, a rise in crime and violence and a consequent gridlocked judicial system, and unstable family structures. In short, the general aim of the 2003 position paper was to alert the global community that language skills and linguistic confidence were central to repositioning the world economy, bracing the often shaky economic structures of developing countries, and ensuring the continuing evolution of technological advances in more developed countries. Education, the UNESCO panel affirmed, was critical to an individual, regardless of ethnicity or religious affiliation, asserting that education was central to guaranteeing individual economic independence, the self-empowerment that comes from employment, and enjoying the respect and dignity available to the educated and the employed. In short, UNESCO declared education itself was a human right.

But how best to convey such information? UNESCO posed. How might any nation best guarantee itself and any subset of its population access to that body of knowledge and, in turn, create and sustain vital day-to-day communication links? UNESCO affirmed the centrality of language. Although it may appear that a position paper affirming language as not merely a right but as a necessity just confirms the obvious, UNESCO was actually addressing disconcerting data that indicated two primary concerns: Nearly one fourth of the world’s population could not write or read, and for a variety of reasons ranging from aging demographics to aggressive military operations and oppressive political regimes, the world was losing languages; languages (like animal species) were quietly edging into extinction as indigenous peoples lost (or were deprived of) their sense of native cultural pride and identity. Preserving that critical sense of human diversity was at the core of the UNESCO position paper, recognizing the rich variety of languages had long defined the broadest and most inclusive vision of humanity itself.

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