The second paragraph of the Preamble of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 10 December 1948 in pertinent part states: “Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people,” (emphasis added)
Only with the Electronic Revolution in second half of the Twentieth Century, did the powerful contemporary process of globalisation on actually begin. While initially human consciousness of the new phenomenon of globalisation focused primarily on globally interacting economic and ecological processes, and secondarily on globally interacting political and military processes, now at the dawn of the Twenty-first Century we face the inescapable and expanding reality of a globally interacting religious processes. In this context, the present concern about the education of children becomes paramount.
Until the advent of globalisation, the great world religions could live fairly compartmentalised in separated geographic regions of the planet. In some places, the presence of various religious traditions would overlap across national boundaries, but this was an exception. At certain times, their encounter became tragically violent, as various faith traditions even supported military conflicts that followed religious lines.
Today, however, as the entire planet is rightfully perceived as one fragile ecosystem, and as new technologies of violence threaten to do far greater social and ecological damage than ever before imagined, we hear fresh voices calling for human solidarity. We hear from UNESCO wise calls for a promotion of a global culture of peace and tolerance. We hear from the United Nations Sub Commission and Commission on Human Rights haunting calls to ground a culture of peace and tolerance in universal recognition of human rights. In addition, we hear from all organs and committees of the entire United Nations profound calls to undertake a dialogue among civilisations.
Each of these calls speaks noble messages to the great religious traditions of the human family, and particularly to their foundational role in educating humanity's precious children. The world's religious traditions carry a special responsibility to promote among the children whom they educate a heightened sense of the need for a global culture of peace, tolerance and non?discrimination, of the need for global defence of human rights, and of the need for ongoing dialogue among religions, civil society and nation states of the worlds' civilisations.
In regard to this last point of the dialogue among civilisations, the great historian of civilisations, the late Arnold Toynbee, long ago pointed out that the deepest energy of any civilisation is always spiritual. Further, another great historian of civilisations, the late Christopher Dawson, added to Toynbee's analysis the insight that civilisations continue to flourish only when they take on new energy from immigrant groups, who bring gifts from yet other civilisations. When civilisations fail to open themselves to outside human energy, Dawson claimed, those civilisations loose their creativity, experience atrophy, and become rigid ? like a human body that has lost its very life principle.
Hence if there is to be a dialogue among civilisations, it will of necessity become a dialogue among world religions, and in turn a dialogue of mutual influence. Again, school education is foundational to this dialogue, for it forms the consciousness of the future generations.