Built from the ashes of World War II, UNESCO has the mandate of safeguarding global peace to enhance solidarity of humanity by promoting international intellectual cooperation across national boundaries. Children who bore and would bear the marks of the war, the weakest, the most vulnerable and sensitive, and who would be the future of the world, became the target of UNESCO’s mental engineering in the post-WWII era. UNESCO very quickly launched a worldwide survey of the war-handicapped children aiming to address the issue of children education. While children from developed countries such as Dennmark and Switzerland participated in the mutual-help or exchange programs that UNESCO promoted for international understanding and educational reconstruction, children war orphans from underdeveloped countries such as China were inaccessible to such programs and could not smile due to lack of food, malnutrition, and basic education etc. Drawing upon Chinese documentation and the archives of the meetings, conference, workshops and documents from UNESCO, this presentation will first of all look into how UNESCO define its role as a UN agency of education by addressing children education in post-WWII era. By locating UNESCO’s action on children education in the humanist intellectual context of this organ, in particular the scientific humanism proposed by Julian Huxley, it will sort out how the belief in science and rationality and the scientific experiment methodology affected UNESCO’s attempt at addressing post-war children education. By bringing in the case of China, the presentation also seeks to demonstrate how the situation and perspective from the Global South helped to shape UNESCO’s agenda on children education and enhance its legitimacy beyond Europe.
