A/CONF.189/PC.2/22 page 4 Introduction 1. Wars and all forms of discrimination and intolerance are borne in the minds of men and action should thus be taken as a matter of priority at this level more than at others. This sentence, which is based on the preamble of the Constitution of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, eloquently sums up the cause-and-effect relationship between education, racial discrimination and religious intolerance. 2. The role of education is, in fact, much broader. As the key to a nation’s development, education is one of the basic indicators used to measure the extent of the success of a country, a region or a particular group. As the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights stated in its General Comment No. 13 (twenty-first session, 1999) on the right to education (article 13 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights), “increasingly, education is recognized as one of the best financial investments States can make” (E/C.12/1999/10, para. 1). The reports of United Nations specialized agencies and programmes give it pride of place among the factors which contribute to a country’s human development. 3. Education is a very broad concept and was defined by UNESCO in 1974 as “the entire process of social life by means of which individuals and social groups learn to develop consciously within, and for the benefit of, the national and international communities, the whole of their personal capacities, attitudes, aptitudes and knowledge”.1 This constant and ongoing process of the training of the mind thus does not involve only children and members of national communities. Article 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights proclaims that “everyone has the right to education”. Education does not, moreover, take place only in school. It has a more global significance and involves several participants, whose importance varies, of course, according to the age of the person being educated, the type of society and the level of development of the country concerned, etc., but all of which go to make society as a whole responsible for the education of citizens. The family, taken both in the broad and in the narrow senses, schools, the media, religion, politicians, trade unions and the environment in general thus take part in one way or another in the process of education. 4. For the purposes of this study, however, education, as it relates to racial discrimination and religious intolerance, has a more restrictive and at the same time decisive meaning. From the time he starts school, the future adult builds the basic elements of how he views himself and others. The concepts of teaching, instruction and schooling are more restrictive, of course, and, in principle, relate only to the transmission of knowledge and the intellectual training of children and even of adults (basic education), but it is mainly during the transmission of knowledge that society, through the intermediary of teachers and the educational system in general, imparts its beliefs, its dominant values and, in particular, its negative or positive ideas of the racial and religious diversity of the human race to children and adolescents. Schools - and families - are thus not only a context for instruction and the transmission of knowledge, they are also vehicles for “moral and social attitudes calculated to promote the egalitarian and pluralistic ideal”.2 5. Article 5 of the World Declaration on Education for All (Jomtien, Thailand, 5-9 March 1990) summed up the importance of what is at stake in this regard in the following terms, which are entirely relevant to the purpose of the present study: “The main delivery system for the basic education of children outside the family is primary schooling. Primary