At the June 5-6, 2005 annual conference of the U.S. Commission on UNESCO, CCD Executive Director Robert LaGamma, a Commission member, spoke before the Social and Human Sciences Panel and called on UNESCO to play a major role in fostering education for democracy around the world. These are his remarks:

My theme is that the time has come for a concerted, sustained, energetic international campaign to promote democracy through education and that UNESCO should play a leading role in that campaign..

We live in an age of profound social transformation, an age that respects no national frontiers. Electronic jet streams disseminate ideas, both good and bad at the speed of light. One of the most powerful ideas that has been blowing in the wind is that ordinary citizens have the right to influence decisions that affect their lives. The spread of this notion over the airwaves and over the internet has led to the many colored revolutions of our time on all continents.

Globalization has made people almost everywhere aware that they can fell tyrants if they are willing to take risks by joining with fellow citizens. They have before them a menu containing many options for achieving political change. They can select the Polish or South African models, the examples from Chile or Portugal or Spain, or they can emulate South Korea, the Philippines, Mali, Ukraine or Georgia.

But once the statues of Salazar or Pinochet have been pulled down, once the soldiers have returned to their barracks, once apartheid has been dismantled, what then? Then comes the hard part. The consolidation of democracy, we have learned, depends more than on free elections, more than on a new constitution and more than on a set of new institutions of representative government. It depends on changing habits, attitudes and perspectives of an entire citizenry, those who have made the transition from tyranny to freedom.

A new mind set must be developed if democracy is to take root and if the transition is to be successful. Some years ago I called upon the Director of the National Teacher Training College in the West African republic of Guinea. The Marxist dictatorship of Sekou Toure had been overthrown a half dozen years earlier. I asked the Director what his school needed most. He responded: a professor of philosophy. Why? To produce a new text because philosophy was a required subject in the secondary schools and since he had no one who could revise the textbooks, the old repudiated ideology was still being taught. The old regime lived on in the texts and was being transmitted to a new generation of teachers and through them to a new generation of students.

There is an urgent need to help peoples who have sacrificed greatly to oust dictators to rewrite those textbooks all over the world. Dictators may have been ousted, but the ancien regime lingers in the minds of teachers, in curricula and in texts. The old habits die hard.

We know from the United Nations Development Program reports on the problems of the Arab World that the freedom deficit in that region is linked to its cultural isolation. The report notes one measure of that isolation: more books were published in translation in Spain in a single year than were translated into Arabic in more than fifty years. While opening the Arab World’s door to the world via translations would be an important step forward, it would be even more important to stimulate the development of publishing outlets that would allow Arabs thinkers to publish their ideas on modernization and democracy.

The Council for a Community of Democracies is a small NGO that has joined with other NGOs to make the promotion of democracy education central to our objective of promoting democracy itself. We have worked with the California-based Center for Civic Education, Street Law, the American Forum on Global Education, Children’s Resources International, the National Endowment for Democracy and the American Federation of Teachers and its Shanker Institute.

At a conference CCD organized two years ago at Pocantico the Conference Center of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund we brought together those organizations with experts from Asia, Africa, the Americas and Europe for the purpose of defining the problem globally. Together we drafted what we call a Global Strategic Plan for Democracy Education. That Strategic Plan seeks to link the efforts of nongovernmental organizations with that of governments and multilateral organizations especially UNESCO, UNDP and the World Bank.

Central to the definition of what’s wrong, according to that plan, is the paucity of resources and the failure of governments to accord education for democracy a sufficiently high priority. Let us recall, that for lack of a nail the battle was lost. Our own Council came into being following the Warsaw Ministerial Conference that created the Community of Democracies movement. Since its inception in June 2000 the Community has consistently given high priority to democracy education as fundamental to the building of democratic societies at a time in which fragile new democracies and those striving to make the transition to democracy are seeking ways to consolidate their gains.

In March of this year we built on the first Pocantico Conference with a second to define the problems and propose solutions to the fostering of democracy in the Arab World. That conference allowed NGOs from the region to join with European and Americans to produce a plan that would expose their citizens to the fundamentals of democracy consistent with their own culture.

The role of NGOs has been central to the Community of Democracies effort. The Organization of American States (OAS) offers a model of cooperation that deserves to be examined. Its democracy promotion unit has systematically worked to link educators from throughout the hemisphere to share ideas and explore best practices.

Since this gathering brings us together to recommend courses of action for UNESCO, let me suggest that at this time nothing that organization can do is more important than to lead the campaign for civic education around the world. Democracy must not be shunned because of the logic of universality, the argument that a UN agency cannot act in favor of democracies because that is not the form of government of all UN members. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights proclaimed a vision that we have come much closer to today than ever before in history. It is time for UNESCO to find ways of fully supporting that vision as has UNDP in recent years. What is needed is a sustained, coordinated, imaginative effort to help peoples everywhere understand their roles as participants in preserving the gains made in human rights and democracy. UNESCO must provide support for the work of NGOs in the field, among them the Brussels-based CIVITAS and its Arab cousin, Jordan-based Arab CIVITAS.

In the last few years our vision has been clouded by the horror of terrorism. The more mundane drama of our time is the drama of democratization. Its story needs to be told. Its success and heroes should be extolled and celebrated. We need not send to ask for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for us.