Experimenting with a global panacea: UNESCO’s Fundamental Education programme in China, 1945–1950

Abstract

The United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) was set up in the aftermath of World War II with the mandate of safeguarding global peace by promoting international intellectual cooperation across national boundaries. UNESCO’s first flagship educational initiative, launched in 1946, was the Fundamental Education programme, which ran until 1958. This article traces the role of China in the history of this UNESCO project, both in terms of inspiring the initial concept and in terms of piloting it. The author maps out a transnational network of concepts, ideas, people, institutions, funds, etc. that shaped the programme. Informed by scientific experimental methodology, the design of UNESCO’s ambitious Fundamental Education initiative was to implement long-term, systematic and comprehensive schemes addressing illiteracy, public health, civil education and livelihood, etc. While the actors collaborating in this project shared some beliefs, their group as a whole reflected a divergent ideational spectrum, represented multiple interest groups, and was intertwined with both local and international politics. In the case of the interventions designed for piloting in China, these circumstances, as well as the multiple challenges of post-World War II reconstruction, the Chinese civil war and the Cold War had the effect of reducing the original concept to a small snapshot pilot project, limited to a specific subject (“the healthy village”). The article concludes with a consideration of the historical legacy of the cooperation between UNESCO and China in later decades.