Fundamental Education For A Better Life: Towards A First Translation Of Human Rights In Practice Through UNESCO's First Regional Fundamental Education Centre - CREFAL - In Mexico

The end of the Second World War marked the start of a new era with worldwide support for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). In signing the Universal Declaration, Member States of the United Nations (UN) pledged to promote a series of universal values codified in the document. As a UN organisation, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) was assigned to disseminate the declaration and its content through educational initiatives and mass communication worldwide. The ideal of creating worldwide peace in the minds of men and women with equity in and respect for each other’s rights was centralised in its mission. Moreover, education was seen as a solution for the creation of a changing mentality in several target groups, from governing bodies to children. The development of educational and communication tools has enthusiastically begun to achieve this goal. One of their first initiatives on the dissemination of human rights was the creation of a travel album inspired by the 1949 Human Rights Exhibition at the Musée Galliera in Paris. The aim was to spread the album worldwide and teach the global population about their rights and duties. The first years of UNESCO were inherently connected with support for the creation of the UDHR, and their programme and perspective on (the right to) education. During its early years, the educational department had many plans, including projects on fundamental education. Fundamental education aimed to create happier lives for men and women in relation to their environment and culture, ultimately leading to social and economic progress. UNESCO had high ambitions for this initiative. However, it is difficult to find any research in the literature that focuses on these projects and their practical implementation. In this dissertation, I aim to reconstruct the story of UNESCO’s first regional centre on fundamental education, the “Centro Regional de Educación Fundamental en América Latina” (CREFAL), in the Pátzcuaro region of Mexico in relation to the UDHR. The development of the centre and its programme will be explored through archival research in UNESCO, local and national archives, the archive of Jaime Torres Bodet at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), the Library of Congress and the archives of CREFAL and the Organization of American States (OAS). By utilising images, videos, audio, and documents related to this centre, I aim to reconstruct the transfer and circulation of the first translation of the right to education, encompassing fundamental education and human rights in general. In my dissertation, I will argue that UNESCO’s ideals, as reflected in the UDHR, quickly challenged their project realisation and, consequently, their relations with and between its member states. This change might have only enlarged the difficult intermediating task for UNESCO to propagate peace “in the minds of men”. Consequently, the organisation’s own projects, in this case their project on fundamental education, experienced large downfalls and their core ideas were transferred into other projects leading to the end of their ambitious project in 1958.