Word: unesco
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...Biscuit? To decrease international tension caused by misunderstanding, representatives of some 500 U.S. organizations (the exact figure was undetermined) met in Philadelphia last week. They had been asked to advise the U.S. delegates to UNESCO. The meeting was the strangest infusion of brotherhood since William Penn came there to found "a greene Country Towne" in 1682-or at least since Karl Marx's First International broke up there...
Philadelphia wondered what UNESCO was. A biscuit? A radio station? That Rumanian composer? The letters stood for United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. It was dedicated to the proposition that "since wars begin in the minds of men . . . the peace must therefore be founded . . . upon the intellectual and moral solidarity of mankind." Few at its Philadelphia conclave disagreed with that proposition. Fewer still were sure they knew what it meant...
There were a dozen other panels, from Educational Reconstruction through Humanities & Philosophy to Museums. Sir Ramaswami Mudaliar, of India, reminded his listeners that misunderstandings work both ways: "The barbarians think we are barbarians." UNESCO's Bernard Drzewieski, a pint-sized Pole, pointed up UNESCO's need: "In some parts of Greece and Poland there are 50 kids to one pencil." But Drzewieski himself had trouble with one small cultural barrier: he attributed the dream of "the new city of Friends" to "Walter" Whitman...
...Idea? In midweek the 90-man National Commission for UNESCO met to discuss the recommendations of the 500 organizations-and pass its own recommendations up the line. This led to more concrete suggestions, if not more outright clarification. Present were such prominent folk as: Commission Chairman Milton Eisenhower, president of Kansas State College of Agriculture and Applied Science and a younger, scholarly edition of General Ike; Assistant Secretary of State William Benton and his oldtime advertising partner, Chester Bowles; Donald M. Nelson (now of Hollywood), and Texas' witty historian Frank Dobie...
Dobie had a radical suggestion: "We're not going to get anywhere under the im-aginationless name of UNESCO. Call it 'people-just people.'" A bobby-soxer had an idea: "What about every school in the United States adopting a needy school somewhere in the world?" Chairman Eisenhower "liked that idea very much...