Words Change Their Meanings But Linger in Organizational Charters

`When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, `it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less.'
Lewis Caroll, Through the Looking Glass

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization was created more than 60 years ago. The "other C" in its charter was Communications. I have become increasingly aware of the changes in the meanings of the words defining its charter.

The culture program of UNESCO once focused on museums, great literature, great music and the highest achievements of world culture, notably on the achievements of Western culture. The word in general use had that context of the greatest achievements of mankind. With the growth of the social sciences, culture has come to be accepted in its anthropoligical sense of the entire body of ideas, values and institutions that define a people and distinguish one cultural group from another. UNESCO's programs have consequently expanded from the original narrow focus to include concern for intangible cultural heritage of all societies and the interplay of culture and social and economic development.

The communications program of UNESCO was, I believe, the initiative of William Benton. He was an advertising executive who became a "dollar a year man" Assistant Secretary of State at the end of World War II (before going on to the U.S. Senate and other achievements). Fascists had demonstrated the potential of propaganda to distort the public understanding of current events, and UNESCO was seen as a means of helping to avoid future problems with such propaganda. The media of the day included radio and movies as well as the print media, but even those media were limited primarily to audiences in rich nations. An important focus of the early UNESCO program was protection of freedom of the press. It advocated publishing and libraries to expand the reach of the print media. Of course, the intervening six decades have seen the development of television, the explosion of telephony (especially via wireless phones), the dissemination of personal computers, the invention of the Internet and of the World Wide Web. Few people in 1946 could have conceived of cyberspace. Our understanding of the very word "communication" must be fundamentally different than that of the founders of UNESCO. Today, UNESCO's communication program has expanded from its roots in libraries and publishing to include focus on cyberspace and the evolving information society.

World War II saw the inventions of radar and the atom bomb, thereby convincing world leaders that the scientific laboratory was relevant to national power. In the intervening six decades, not only has the global scientific enterprise expanded beyond all recognition, into fields that could barely have been imagined in the 1940s, but science-based technological innovation has been increasingly recognised as the source of economic development and advantage, indeed of economic health. Moreover, the development of social science has if anything been even more dramatic than that of the natural sciences. Led by Joseph Needham and Julian Huxley, UNESCO early focused on the dissemination of science from developed to developing nations, while also seeking to catalyze international cooperation in the most advanced sciences of the day. Today, albeit with pitifully inadequate resources, UNESCO seeks to serve the broader mission of science, technology and innovation.

Similarly, in six decades the ideas underlying the word "education" have expanded and been transformed. Educational aspirations have increased in every society, as the the knowledge base of mankind has expanded. Pedagogical theory has been elaborated and new media are challenging traditional approaches to learning, as indeed educational institutions have evolved far beyond their post-war forms. UNESCO, first conceived as a means of rebuilding the educational infrastructure destroyed in the World War, now focuses on Education for All and the harmonization of gobal educational systems.

"we must run as fast as we can just to stay in the same place"
Lewis Carroll's Red Queen from Through the Looking-Glass

We know in the abstract that languages evolve and words change their meanings over time. Still the changes described above have taken place in my lifetime, and I find it difficult in every-day life to recognise that they don't mean now what they meant when UNESCO was created. I think of the Constitution of an organization as evolving through ammendments, and in the case of UNESCO through changes in governance imposing changes on its interpretation. Still, in the case of UNESCO, the meaning of the Constitution has changed in my lifetime as a result of changes in the meanings of the words in which it is written.