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The Philippines could be described as the most westernised of the countries in South East Asia, and Thailand on the other hand, the least westernised, never having been colonised by a European country. Iran had completely different lessons to teach about development. The Shah was introducing reforms fast. Votes for women, no more veils, at least when attending any official function, a 'White Revolution of Land Reform,' a new literacy campaign and so on. A student leader complained to me that 'He is stealing our programme from us.' The Shah, however, kept a plane in his garden, fearing it was possible that he might have to escape in a hurry, or so the rumour went. Working in such an unstable country made it a new experience, as any long-term planning is not taken seriously. The coups of Thailand seemed very gentle compared with the mysterious threats in Iran. There is a well-known saying 'He knows not England who only England knows' and I would add that 'He knows not development who knows development in only one developing country.’ Fortunately, I like surprises and Iran was full of them. Once on an Indian train, after my time in Iran, I was asked by a fellow traveller, one of two bank officials going to take a course:

'Would you mind if I asked you a personal question?'
'No, of course not.' I replied with some hesitation.
'Do you ever feel embarrassed, coming here, as you do, from the ex-imperialist country?'

'Yes, of course I do.' I replied hastily. ‘But not so much as you might think, because my family has been anti-imperialist for generations.'

It is a pity that he laughed without pursuing the matter or I would have told him about my father's claim that Barclays Dominion, Colonial and Overseas, was training the future Civil Services of independent Africa. Additionally, I might have mentioned John Bright's gibe that the British Empire was a gigantic system of out-door relief for the less capable members of the British aristocracy.
His question was, however, much more relevant to Iran than might be supposed. In that country on several occasions when looking for the Teacher Training College we made our way to the largest building in the provincial capital and found that it had at one time been the British Consulate.

'Whatever made them need such a huge building?' I asked.
'That was when the British ruled the country,' he replied.
'But Iran was never part of the Empire.'
'That may be, but anyone who put his foot wrong, tended to disappear.'

In this way I gradually learned some of the drawbacks of being English. It may affect British UN civil servants and would create difficulties for British mediators and such Non-Governmental Organisations as Oxfam. I realised that the same applies to Afghanistan. A.E. Housman's sad poems of soldiers dying overseas were, perhaps, sadder than he realised, sad for the soldiers certainly but also for their opponents. 'And there with the rest are the lads that will never be old.'
That was the first surprise. Another surprise was the astonishing beauty of spring when the fruit trees blossom appears in all its glory with a background of snow-capped mountains. The comparable miniature paintings are true to life, even including the bright but narrow bands of flowers edging the tiny watercourses. I had been introduced to the glories of the famous Persian miniature painting as a boy, so when visiting a museum during my work in Tehran and finding a painter at work, I asked to see his brush. Yes,

it did seem to be a single hair. How long was he taking to complete one picture? Yes, it was a whole year! It was to form the cover of a photograph album, a gift to be made by the Shah. A year may seem a long time but when I take into account the occasional lifetime sentence digging Qanats, the deep, wide, underground channels carrying water from the edge of the mountains out towards the desert, it seems short.
The beauty of Iran is summed up for many by the mosques, but for me it is best summed up by the carpets, gardens, and poems, which, in my mind all belong together. Carpets are used for all sorts of purposes such as decorating the exterior of houses at festivals. The landlords garden in each village seemed to be open to the public in his absence, so you could drive into the country, choose a garden, spread your Persian carpet and compose poetry, and the colours in each enhanced one another beautifully. Poetry is a main feature of Iranian culture. My counterpart said one day 'I want you to meet General so and so, a very great poet.' On another occasion I said to my landlord Mr Mirseyedi, 'I've been told that in this country people play poetry games.' Oh yes he replied and started playing against the driver, capping each line of poetry with a line which began with the same letter as the one at the end of the previous line supplied by the driver. After some time capping each other's lines, the driver won. Needless to say such people carry hundreds of lines in their heads, which they have learned by heart at some stage in their life.
Perhaps it is due to this passion for poetry that the quality of conversation was so very rich. I used to say that there is more good conversation per square mile in Tehran, than in the other towns where I had lived: London, Paris, Oxford, or Birmingham. Television may have had quite a lot to do with this lack of richness in conversation in western countries. In Iran this conversational atmosphere may be due in part to the presence of many servants in the homes, and you should bear in mind that even poor illiterate Iranians have dictated and published books of poems. I brought such a book home as a curiosity.
Good conversation may arise partly from the importance attached to hospitality. There is a story of an American visiting Iran, he was a lover of horses, he found a very special steed that he

wanted to buy and he offered almost any sum of money for this horse. Unfortunately he could not persuade the owner to part with the much-loved animal. When he got home he was complaining about his failure, and his Iranian host said, 'Maybe I should not be telling you this but it is a custom to give a guest anything he wants before a meal begins.' So the crafty American arranged to get an invitation to the home where he had failed previously, and then brought the conversation around to the horse, wondering whether the host might have changed his mind. His tribal host held up his hands in horror explaining that there was no longer any question of this because, having no other meat to offer, he had sacrificed the horse. The horse was on the table before his eyes. It was explained that there had been nothing else to offer to him the honoured guest.
It seemed to me very important to learn about the aggressive nature of the Iranian way of life and promote discussion about its similarities and differences from the way of life in England. It seemed best to delay publishing it lest it upset anyone in Tehran. I later published the article under the title 'Why Iran Erupts' and based it on the theme that the climate and diet should be taken into account when looking at these differences and similarities in ways of living. See Appendix 4
Having set the scene in which my work was to be done, I cannot do better than describe the preparation during the first year, for my teaching during the second year. It included travelling to see how teachers were being trained, the variety of villages and village problems and learning the attitudes to education among villagers as well as the civil service. For some pages based on my diary see Appendix 5.
At that time I was busy completing a small volume to be published by Gollancz, Men Against War , which was successful in reaching three editions. I had started writing it in 1958 and by immersing myself in one after another of these great men's lives, it was possible to take six or seven years to complete the task. How was it possible to choose among the large number of the potential heroes of peace? One of my cynical colleagues in Thailand proposed Napoleon for having fought the most wars and therefore obliged to make peace most often. The selection proved to be highly complicated. Eventually each person was chosen for their distinctive

contribution to peace, and their interesting lives, their geographical spread, but also for their attractiveness to the expected readership.
No doubt someone else would produce a completely different list with the exception of Gandhi. No doubt I chose them because I had special information about all except Asoka. Gandhi was known to many of my friends, particularly Jan Smuts. John Bright was my great grandfather. Tolstoy was a close friend of Ruth's grandfather, from whom photographs and letters were handed down. William Penn was buried where we were married. Dag Hammarskjöld I met in 1937 when a member of a Fabian party producing a book in Sweden. Ceresole was the founder of the Work-camp Movement, but known to few.
This list looks much more political than it might be made today. It includes no educationalist, no psychologist, no peace researcher, no film director, and no poet. This may be because such people lead lives which seldom make a story. It's criteria look too much like those of the people who award the Carnegie Peace Prize. Here are the thoughts behind my choice.

Asoka the successful military commander who nevertheless was struck by the horrors of war and ended them.
Penn who set an example of treating a minority fairly.
Bright who promoted peace by the sheer power of his oratory.
Tolstoy whose novels ended the glory of war.
Gandhi whose non-violence made him most people's first choice.
Smuts having shaped the League of Nations lived to open the UN's first conference at San Francisco.
Hammarskjöld the inspired administrator of the UN.
Ceresole whose work-camps started the process of reconciliation, after the First World War.

As this writing finished I took on at Roger Wilson's request, the manuscript that he and Waclaw Micuta had begun, a pamphlet to help UN officials working in cultures other than their own. The first job to undertake was to seek the help of the Resident

Representative of the UN's Technical Assistance Board. This man's work, involved co-ordinating the services of all the UN's agencies from the large World Health Organisation (WHO), and Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO), to the much smaller Drug Control Unit. The Resident Representative turned out to have attended the Dragon School and so may have been extra keen to help me to identify the UN officials based in Teheran, who might have useful anecdotes illustrating the mistakes easily made when working in unfamiliar cultures.
There was someone who told me the well-known story of the picture of a magnified mosquito. It looked large enough to terrify the bravest people. However, when pressed to take part in an anti-mosquito campaign the audience was unwilling to take part. Someone explained 'We don't have mosquito's that size.' I spoke with a colleague who had arranged to set drug smugglers free if they would take part in anti-drug films. It was difficult to get much support when even the Deputy Minister of Education complained that his father took opium every night and had lived to a ripe old age. In the end we decided to avoid local examples and placed at the beginning of the introduction this passage:

There is an oriental story of a monkey and a fish, which were caught in a great flood. The monkey sprang to safety in a tree. Looking down (as the water rose), he saw the fish swimming hard, head on to the current. At considerable risk, he moved out along a branch and swung down to scoop the fish out of the flood. Great was his disappointment when he found that the fish was not pleased to receive this technical assistance.

Aid needs to be appropriate to the needs of the recipient. Sometimes the wrong help is worse than no help at all. Whether we are dealing with technical assistance or conflict management, we often have difficulties in understanding the points of view of both sides and westerners need to know Gandhi's reply when he was asked what he thought of western civilisation. 'It would be a good idea.' He replied.
By the time Roger Wilson had contributed from his deep wisdom and Waclaw Micuta from his boundless enthusiasm, I had little to do other than editing, as Waclaw said he could never be

sure of his English. My role proved to be to write a concluding section and choose some quotations as section headings. I think in this example of good cooperation we were all pleased at least with what the others had done. In particular Waclaw liked my headings such as Aristotle's, which I have already quoted, 'How shall I learn, unless it be from my friend?' and Mary P. Follett’s 'Like electrical engineers, we must set friction to work for us,' a maxim or apothegm appreciated by peace-makers.
The thirty-page pamphlet was printed by the UNDP in New York under the title 'Briefing of International Consultants' in several languages and used for some years, and much of what it contains is relevant to others going on business to the tropics. I write 'business' recollecting that we used to confront ourselves with the story of two salesmen for two shoe manufacturers, who had studied the market opportunities in a West African country and had met in a hotel. One grumbled 'Most people do not wear shoes. I've wired home to say I'm coming home tomorrow.' That's odd replied his new friend 'I've wired home to say 'Most people here go barefoot, send all the shoes you can.' That is a thought provoking version of the stories about optimists and pessimists.
There is the old story about the two frogs which fell into a pail of creamy milk they found no way out, one of them gave up and drowned, the other kept on swimming round and round until it could leap to safety from a pat of butter. These stories are useful for anyone on a peace platform, because there are often some members of the audience who still believe that there will always be wars, which they attribute to human nature, despite the Seville Statement on Violence sponsored by UNESCO. It is of course true that there have always been wars, but the situation has changed as weapons have become more dangerous. There are still 400 farms in Britain banned from carrying livestock as a result of the Chernobyl explosion, though the explosion was very small compared with what nuclear bombs could produce.
During my first year in Iran I acquainted myself with the good and bad features of the system of teacher training. I sometimes wondered whether I was doing what was needed, and what was wanted by the officials of the Ministry of Education, who would be continuing my work after I left. I had failed to make such warm

friendships as I had experienced in Thailand, and yet they responded so eagerly to my harsh comments on the teaching methods and my description of the value of extra-curricular activities that it was decided to put extra-curricular activities into the curriculum! I enjoyed the irony of the logic but wondered whether the leisure activities would become formal like other school subjects.
Turning over my papers this year (2001) it seems that I wrote countless reports and memos for officials, sometimes at their request and sometimes on my own initiative. The language problem for this was considerable, because the second language for older men was often French, and yet I was never asked to get one of my colleagues to translate. On top of that it is difficult to work thoroughly when a regime is not secure and it is probable that one is going to be replaced. I think it was at this time that the UN's Technical Assistance Programme was threatened with a major cut in resources, putting our posts at risk, and we were flattered when the receiving states got together and decided they would finance technical assistance themselves. Morale rose markedly! The relationship between local and expatriate officials needs to be managed very carefully because it often appeared that we were paid much more than our counterparts for doing the same work. The penalty of leaving a family behind is often overlooked, as is the difficulty of working in different circumstances. I remember the acute homesickness I experienced at Karaj. I tried treating it with such lines as:

Oh tarnish late on Wenlock Edge,
Gold that I never see;
Lie long, high snowdrifts in the hedge
That will not shower on me.
A.E. Housman A Shropshire Lad

But the medicine was counterproductive as was Gerard Manley Hopkins' Inversnaid; the favourite poem of Ruth, containing those words, later to be used at her memorial service:

What would the world be once bereft
Of wet and of wildness?

I decided to learn the whole poem by heart when I spent half the week at Karaj.

The new work at Karaj arose through the success of men like Mr Azmoun which was described in an article in the Times Educational Supplement in March 1965. The Ministry and Mr de Clerk, chief of UNESCO Mission, made plans for training the best of the first group of the Literacy Corps, or the Army of Knowledge as they were known. They needed extra skills to help their successors. It is clear from the description of Mr Azmoun's work, who was one of this first group, that they had many skills to acquire. First they had to teach the ordinary reading, writing and arithmetic, made easier by the enormous eagerness of the children to learn and the strong backing up by the parents. They had to add to these the knack of relating these to the village work they undertook by reading and writing about agricultural work and animal husbandry which were often rather new fields for the young men who had grown up in towns and who had tended to despise peasant life. Then they had gradually to acquaint themselves with the needs of the village so that the schools could become the centres of sustainable village development. For this it was necessary for me to learn something about land ownership in Iran. The landlords varied more than might be expected, there were some very wealthy, like the one who admitted that his estate was about as large as Switzerland, some younger and irresponsible like the father of one of my friends who lost a village one evening by gambling at cards. According to the villagers most of the villages were the sole property of relatively poor men who pressed them harshly for their rents. A few might be described as reforming landlords, inclined to follow the example of the Shah, by selling them cheaply to the families who worked them. My counterpart and I visited a few of them to explain what was going on at their schools and solicit their interest and help in the improvements in the village.
One village reminded me of Glastonbury and Street, where for a long time no agreement could be reached about the site for the new school building. I made a prophet’s speech about UNESCO's interest in encouraging cooperation and the many considerations to keep in mind when locating a school. In an extreme case they might benefit from employing an outsider to decide for them after hearing the two sides of the case. Schools should welcome opportunities to demonstrate conflict management. I had rather a stony reception that day, but blamed myself for lack of experience. It is

hard to lighten the atmosphere when working through an interpreter and trying to raise a laugh.
In each village a survey was made with a view to finding out the improvements most desired. For the most part both students and villagers could not imagine their villages being different from how they had always been. One student came to me and spoke with indignation, 'There have been no changes here' he began, 'the trees are the same, the endless mud is always the same, the houses made of mud bricks are always the same. I have nothing to write.' He added fiercely. Knowing that he was speaking for many others whose English was less fluent, and realising that I had not explained their assignment sufficiently well, I replied 'Where is the headman's house? Let’s go and ask him.' Soon we were sitting on the ground in the headman's house listening to his replies to the questions I asked through an interpreter. I started gently:

Are the clothes and shoes you are wearing different from what your father or grandfather wore?
Do you eat any food that they did not have?
Who do you think might have been the first person in the village to eat that?
(The innovators are the potential allies of the educators who are necessarily concerned with social change.)
What changes in transport have there been in your time?
How long has the school been going?

Conversation sprang up about the number of people who could read, about what had been learned by going on pilgrimages to Mecca and to places nearer home such as Qom. After this session, the student came to me again and his eyes were alight: 'I see what you mean now' he exclaimed with delight. 'I am going to write a book about my village.' Another student said that he liked what he called learning by asking questions. 'It is a good way. Although it is difficult, I will bring up my sons that way.' Memorising text-books is very common in developing countries and the system of examination tends to perpetuate it and produce the well known problems of very conservative administration, of uncreative teachers and the marginalizing of poets and artists.

Sometimes the work took unexpected forms. Waclaw Micuta sent me a solar cooker to test. It was shaped like an umbrella upside down. In place of a handle there was a container to hold the cooking pot on which the circular strips of wood covered in foil were focussed. It cost almost nothing to run but it was rejected partly because it produced no light in the evening, and also because paraffin was extremely cheap due to the fact that Iran was an oil producing country. Hay-box cooking was unknown at this time in Iran. I hope it will be remembered when the oil supply begins to dwindle. I was very impressed by the extraordinary amount of heat produced from this solar cooker, and wrote to my friend Denis Healey, when he was Chancellor of the British Exchequer, to ask that all 'council' houses with south facing roofs should be fitted with solar panels. All I got in reply was a civil servant's answer. Democratic politicians have difficulty in looking ahead so as to avoid crises occurring without warning.
Measuring the amount of water coming into villages seemed so important in preventing water disputes that I sought the help of a Dutchman working for the UN. When I thanked him he answered: 'My work is my play, my play is my work.' Lucky man, I thought, one could wish for this for everyone. Measuring the water was also an enviable task. It involved working out the volume of water between two points and then floating objects down the stream to find out how fast the volume of water was passing. A neat little formula was provided.
My help was sought by a UN architect for the design of schools in Iran; I told him about the mistake of a British architect who had been designing school buildings in New Zealand. When the day came for an official opening someone asked 'Why does it face the south?' The architect was about to reply 'To catch the warmth of the sun,' when he realised that he had not allowed for the change of hemisphere. I went on to explain how in the Philippines and Thailand schools were designed to keep the direct sunlight out, either with windowpanes of oyster shells or by building long schools from east to west, with windows facing north or south.
My own calculation is that about two new words are used in any good lesson, not counting areas where the home language is different from the schools. Also the pronunciation of new words

has to be heard distinctly so that the children can learn their meaning effectively and use them themselves. This makes it vitally important that the acoustics of the building, including the interference of noise from one class by another, are made clear to architects when they are working on such projects. This can be avoided by thicker partitioning walls, by acoustic tiles, or by situating classrooms appropriately to avoid traffic for example. Acoustics is for architects a relatively new study. Not long ago I went to see a new building in England where a special room was equipped for music. But it’s acoustics were so bad that it had to be converted into a library. This process of careful planning and the rethinking of the basic rules, that an architect must go through, especially when working in new cultures and new climates, is exactly what peace makers need to adopt as they search for solutions to the ever increasing number of different circumstances they find themselves up against. Acoustics have, I believe, a relevance to cultures of peace, but it is merely guess work that noise creates stress, which in turn creates aggression. Who ever heard of a violent garden-city or garden-suburb?
In the final month of my stay in Iran a large international conference on literacy was held in Teheran, and so I was invited to write about the village work of these future school supervisors, which they performed on a one-day weekly plan during their Karaj course. The resulting thirty-three-page brochure or report was published by the Organisation for Teacher Training and Research and was given to those who attended the conference. If I were writing it again, I would make much clearer the ways in which the reading and writing of the children could be related to the village work; thus explaining the value of reading and writing. At this time seventy percent of the population in Iran could neither read nor write. Most of them wished to remove the stigma but had little idea how it could help them in dealing with shopkeepers and other traders. The report is called 'Village Work At Karaj – A Report of the Work of two-hundred Future Supervisors of the Education Corps in Twenty Villages. February – August 1965.'
In addition to village development this pamphlet stressed the importance of children, their friendships, their needs and their families in planning their education but it was too late in my

two years to do any follow-up. One very interesting UNESCO conference had been held in the previous year in which I had a minor part. Believing on the basis of past experience that literacy itself is of little value unless there is a good supply of books, it was decided to hold a meeting for all those involved. Besides authors of children's books, illustrators, publishers, librarians, book-sellers, and teachers, in fact everyone except parents and children met to describe their roles and explain what they needed to perform their functions better. Having set up an exhibition of children's non-fiction books at the request of the Ministry of Education in London, I was fascinated. I would support a campaign to bring books to children, in a country, such as Iran, before they become used to television filling their spare time. It could avoid the dull sameness of knowledge and opinions, which the mass media and the national curriculum combine to produce.
Most of the expatriates working for UNESCO were highly specialised teachers working in a new technical college and the rest of us had little to do with them. Our smaller group included a scientist dealing with earthquakes, he was willing to listen to my proposal to send the bill for a major earthquake to Moscow. This had occurred just before my arrival, killing, or so it was claimed, twelve thousand people. I hazarded a guess that it was caused by the lowering of the Caspian Sea by several feet caused by otherwise excellent Soviet irrigation schemes. The Iranian houses are built with clay roofs, which are added to yearly, so that they become very heavy, and lethal when they fall down without warning.
Statistics such as the deaths from the earthquake are usually not believed by the local people, so no one was surprised when the literacy figures showed the number of new readers to be more than the total population of the country. To meet this need a specialist in statistics was appointed by UNESCO. I do not think he remained long. The trust in officials adhering to the truth is a very valuable part of social capital, and not to be lightly allowed to disappear.
If I were to be asked what it was like to work in Iran at the time, I would have to admit that it did not have the same warm quality of the work in Thailand, but there I was extremely lucky. The Iranians did not trust each other, they had no reason to trust ex-patriates any more. From time to time I annoyed them by refusing to

order equipment with UNICEF funds until teachers colleges had permanent buildings. There were stories of equipment being piled high outdoors at the end of the academic year for anyone to plunder. Eventually the Chief of Mission took the matter into his own hands and gave way to the requests.
On the whole UNESCO was doing a good job in very difficult circumstances, and I was sorry when it was not given credit for my minor successes. If Mr Conrad Opper, who was sent to be the UNESCO – UNICEF liaison officer in New York when I arrived, had remained in his post, my work would have been much better. As it was, Mike Easterly of the US Peace Corps appointed himself as my right hand man, and made life very much easier for me. He was well trained in community or village development and in a short time had learned to speak the language. He was able to report what the students were saying about their course, comment on my projects usefully and on occasions interpret for me. The Peace Corps attracted a very gifted set of people. It was a great pity that it fell into disfavour, mainly, I suppose, because the CIA infiltrated it.
It is odd that the Peace Corps and the Literacy Corps or Army of Knowledge have similar names. Each name hints that armies are becoming redundant and are searching for new roles, but one is made up of military people extending their functions to serve their country in new ways, the other is made up of civilians moving in the opposite direction by accepting a degree of military discipline for the sake of international service and peace. The Peace Corps might have fared better if its aims had been more like those of Pierre Ceresole's work-camps and had included international friendship. After leaving UNESCO's employment in 1965 I maintained whatever contacts I could with the large office in Paris where we were welcomed before and after our service abroad.
Community Schools as described by me are revolutionary rather than reformist institutions. They identify social issues in need of attention and then consider how schools can help. It is hard to understand how peace can be established or the environment preserved without the help of schools. Since that time I have always worked this ethos into teacher training courses in order to make society flexible enough to face the dangers ahead. After Thailand

I gave my time to a countrywide tour of Britain arranged for me by the Council for Education in World Citizenship (CEWC). I sometimes provided questions for group discussion and one of these being 'What corresponds to hookworm in this country?' the answer presented by a pupil to one large meeting was 'What corresponds to hookworm in this country is apathy, but apathy is even worse because there is no medicine for it.'
UNESCO honoured me by inviting me to give a lecture there on Education for International Understanding. I felt that I was being asked to teach my grandmother to suck eggs, but was glad of the contact. We all start with certain assumptions, the question arises: How can children acquire wide rather than narrow points of view so that they are fit for international friendship. An Iranian schoolboy came to me bursting with indignation because his pen friend in London had written to him asking him whether there were telephones or television in Teheran. 'How do I reply to such a stupid question?' he asked. 'Ask him how many drive in banks, and drive in cinemas there are in London.' I replied.
A letter reached me from the editor of the UNESCO Courier, to enquire whether I was prepared to write on peasant life. I sidestepped that one by writing on proverbs as being the window into the peasant mind such as 'When God made time he made plenty of it.' Once I spent a long railway journey translating a booklet of farmer’s proverbs into proverbs dealing with education. It proved to be a very thought-provoking exercise but it did not suit the Courier.
For a periodical on teaching methods published by UNESCO, however, I wrote a number of articles, one of them was on how to deal with making use of classroom walls, and another, on the journey to school, as a teaching aid. In many countries the shortage of books and teaching equipment is so very great that the teacher's voice is the main resource and even little variations count for much. There are so few pilot schools to point the way that dull classrooms are taken for granted or even valued as being free from distraction. In England, classroom windows only reached down to above head height for this very reason until the twentieth century, but then they usually had textbooks.

The principal sequel to my years with UNESCO was an invitation to attend its conference on 'Peace in the Minds of Men,' held in Côte d'Ivoire, at the invitation of the late President Houphouet-Boigny. This conference had all the trappings of grandeur to draw attention to its importance, making as it did a change of emphasis in UNESCO in regard to psychology and, culture in the sense of way of life as opposed to the Fine Arts. He had decided to move the capital from the busy port of Abidjan to the village where he was born. To make a beginning he had built the famous Roman Catholic Cathedral modelled on St. Paul's but twice the size, a large Technical College and the largest Peace Research and Conference Institute I have ever seen, where we met. These grandiose surroundings seemed to be in keeping with the task we had been given which appeared to be to link psychology with peace. For a country with a population size comparable with Portugal to have such an institute is indeed good news. This was peace by trumpet by a man who knew that way of thinking, but I could wish there were more rulers who provided for peace in this way. I fear he may have died before endowing the Institute so that it could bear its share of the work in peace research. I hope it is endowed as handsomely as it is built. By now, going to war is so dangerous that funds spent on non-violent defence should be as great as funds spent on conventional defence.
At the conference itself its importance was marked by the presence of two past Secretary-Generals in addition to the current Secretary General of UNESCO. Our attention was redirected from disarmament and conflict studies to the nature of violence and the culture of peace. The lead seemed to be taken by an American psychologist who persuaded us to sponsor the Seville Statement on Violence, which asserted that violence is not part of human nature but an acquired characteristic, and that human nature is sufficiently flexible to make peace a possibility. This was thoroughly debated and accepted, thanks to the leadership of David Adams, whom, incidentally I did not meet again until the Hague Conference more than ten years later in 2000. He then went on to set the stage for the Decade of the Culture of Peace 2000 - 2010, and now heads the Division for UNESCO, which deals with that particular decade.

I have mixed feelings about this. I would like to substitute the word 'Culture' with 'Way of Life,' because it has already been confused with the fine arts, music, dance, and drama; nor has there been any attempt to identify a culture of peace in any human group such as the Arapesh tribe, described by Margaret Mead, or such as Quakers. The Quakers are so mixed up with the values of an ordinary militarist society that they are not such clear examples as they used to be in the Victorian era. John Bright was the most widely know Quaker at the time and he coined the powerful phrase: 'Force is not a remedy,' but he conceded to his fellow MP's that force might be a necessary condition for applying a remedy when riots get out of hand.
My own interventions in the proceedings were to propose a new volume of Men Against War composed of biographies of suitable people whose names might be put forward by Ministers of Education. I wanted UNESCO to prick consciences of its member governments by asking them to send in suitable names from their own country or region. Despite writing several letters to a UNESCO official whose name I was given, nothing came of it. Abstract ideas such as the culture of peace are best taught to children with the help of biographies and they are needed to balance the influence of war heroes. It seemed to me that to have such an outcome from a big conference would balance the fears that the conference had no visible success.
Secondly I explained the need for a book for student teachers about child psychology. At present this subject is omitted from most developing countries' curricula and teachers often work as though individual differences among children are of no account. I miss Dr W.D. Wall, my tutor at Birmingham University for my M.Ed course. He eventually worked for UNESCO and set up an Institute for Child Study in Bangkok for South East Asia. I was encouraged to follow up these suggestions with a plan of action but the Finnish lady at UNESCO fell ill and I became busy with other projects.
There may be insufficient time; the nuclear bombs may fall too soon for establishing peace by protecting children from bullying parents and schoolfellows. It may be, that considering the nuclear risks that are run by the whole of humanity and the rest of

the animal kingdom, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and similar organisations provide the best hope for children.
It is hard to tell where to put one's energies but at the time I was convinced that there were two options ahead. One was in peace education for children and the other was total nuclear disarmament. Because, despite the fact we cannot change nuclear technology, now we already have it, if we continue to harbour nuclear weapons there will always be the risk of nuclear war. Out of these two options, peace research needs to be expanded, and nuclear technology needs to be brought to an end.
UNESCO, I thought was entrusted to coordinate and encourage peace research but the governments which controlled its policy always seemed to stop short of committing themselves to any effective action, as they did in the same way for peace education. Most of the substantial work was left to private individuals and Non-Governmental Organisations (NGO's). Enough was done, however, to raise the suspicions of right-wing politicians in the USA and in Britain sufficiently for them to succeed in then persuading their governments to resign from UNESCO. Carefully designed dinner parties were held first in the USA and then in London to gather editors of right-wing newspapers and radio programmes at which pressure was brought to bear. Though the wording of articles was ridiculously repetitious, the move was successful. For many years the absence of the two powers of Britain and the USA was maintained. They made it difficult for people like myself to keep our connections with the various departments in UNESCO.
For Governments it is wise to remember that war is like a lottery: when they lose, they and their peoples lose hope and self confidence; when they win they soon become corrupted by power and lose their friends. It is only the cement of international friendship, which can prevent the ultimate holocaust. In John Bright’s time, he spoke about friendship as an aim of foreign policy. He also talked of the importance of personal friendships between politicians, but this seemed unlikely in his day, on account of the difficulties of travel. Now travel has become much easier and the League of Nations, followed by the United Nations have provided the magnificent premises in New York and Geneva, where formal meetings can easily be arranged and casual meetings occur spontaneously.

Even the language barrier has become much reduced with the common use of English as the international language of business.
This is one reason for my regretting Britain's long withdrawal from membership of UNESCO. The Non-Governmental Organisations, churches, universities, and learned societies failed to compensate for its benign influence. Few British people realise the full extent of the insularity of Britain. Quite apart from the belief of the extremists that 'British is best,' there are the British tourists who assume that even a package holiday automatically widens their understanding and justifies their laying down the law.
UNESCO, like some of the other UN agencies, has as its major function the gathering of information from all over the world, which is then digested and circulated in various forms of report. In this way scientists including social scientists, educationalists and those who deal with culture, many of them concerned with development or peace, obtain the raw material on which to base their work. I was glad to be able to take a small part in some of this work after I left Iran.