The World Law Fund: World Approach to International Education

Another assumption underlying current practices in education for international understanding is that the fostering of international friendship through world affairs education will produce peace among nations. Thus, if we each study the history, culture and values of the other, nations will ‘understand’ each other, become ‘friends’ and refrain from organized mayhem against each other. The historical fact of so many intra-cultural wars is too obvious a refutation of this thesis. Indeed, to truly understand another culture may emphasize conflicting values and interests rather than resolve them.

More fundamental in terms of curriculum is the factor of conflict itself. International education must come to deal with the many complex aspects of conflict and its resolution. The World Law Fund, and those educators associated with it, assert that the curriculum of international education should include materials which produce an analytical study of war, conflict and system change and that these aspects of curriculum should be added to inter-cultural and foreign policy study to form a new area of curriculum known as world order. The Fund advocates training in all three of these areas of international education in order to prepare students adequately for responsible world citizenship. Its program has been directed at the introduction of the subject of world order into the curricula of universities, colleges and secondary schools throughout the world. This is an admittedly ambitious goal, and those who have had experience with curriculum revision would doubtless add one that is quixotic if not foolhardy. Yet the Fund’s experience over the past 4 years indicates that the goal is both reasonable and attainable.

The success of the program to date can be attributed to four main factors: (1) the world-wide concern among scholars and educators about the damaging and potentially disastrous system by which relations among nations are now conducted; (2) a program based on the question: “Applying rigorous but conventional intellectual and academic standards for existing courses, is it possible to construct a course which directly confronts the problem of war prevention;” (3) the unusual structure of the program, which operates at all levels of institutional education and in a sense in all stages of curriculum development at one time; and (4) (at least in the United States) the wide movement within the social studies, seeking to incorporate more substantive material into the high school curriculum and to reshape teaching methods in the direction of inquiry and analysis.

In general the Fund seeks to define basic concepts, to develop appropriate teaching materials, to train teachers in the subject matter and the use of the materials and to relate these developments to the most important advances made by other curriculum projects. Many of the methodological aspects of the Fund’s program originated in these projects. The work of Donald Oliver (Harvard Graduate School of Education) on the analysis of controversy, that of Edwin Fenton (Carnegie Institute of Technology) on inquiry and the writings of Michael Scriven (The Social Science Consortium) on evaluation have profoundly affected the pedagogical direction of the development of world order programs for high schools.

The Fund’s high school program emerged in 1963 out of its university program, the latter having been initiated the previous year as the result of a survey of universities and colleges to determine to what extent world order issues were included in the curriculum. The survey was conducted by Professor Saul Mendlovitz (Rutgers Law School, Consultant to the World Law Fund), who discovered that although specific issues of world order were treated within the context of various courses in political science and international relations, few of these courses dealt with all the interrelated factors with a view toward war prevention. Shortly thereafter Professor Mendlovitz was commissioned by the Fund to take the first step toward the solution of the problem, the preparation of the first materials to initiate academic study of war prevention. The resulting Reader, Legal and Political Problems of World Order, became the first in a series of Fund publications for use in universities, high schools and adult education courses and discussion groups.⁵

It is perhaps appropriate to mention here the origin of the World Law Fund and the basic premise on which its program has been developed. In 1958, Grenville Clark, noted lawyer and distinguished public servant, together with Professor Louis B. Sohn of the Harvard Law School, published an extensively detailed plan for war prevention based on a revised United Nations Charter entitled World Peace Through World Law. The elimination of war as an instrument of national policy had long been a concern of Mr. Clark, a man who had also devoted much time to the solution of community problems. Clark and Sohn put forth their Plan, not as the solution to the problem but as a contribution toward a solution. One might, in fact, consider Mr. Clark a kind of pioneer of the inquiry method. A strong believer in the educative effectiveness of prolonged, analytic discussion, he wished to initiate such discussion of war-peace problems. It was his conviction that the establishment of a peaceful international system could result only from identifying the major issues, carefully analyzing related problems and weighing the merits of various solutions. The Plan was put forth, therefore, as a first step in such a process.

Despite the fact that Clark and Sohn were themselves totally without messianic intent in the publication of their book, it was realized that the initiation of world-wide, public discussion on the basis of nothing more than one plan could be considered indoctrination and would likely result in the emergence of little more than a dialogue between the adherents and opponents of the Plan. Such a limited dialogue could not possibly bring about a discussion of the breadth and depth necessary to the desired educative process. Professor Mendlovitz took this circumstance into consideration in the preparation of Legal and Political Problems of World Order and conceived of his task as one of avoiding the potentially propagandistic dialogue in favor of valid scholarly discourse. He made what he conceived to be the only legitimate academic use of World Peace Through World Law, a model of one possible world system for the control of organized international violence. Thus the materials in the Reader are employed to examine the model’s ability to stand up to the tests of feasibility, workability and justice. The Clark-Sohn Plan is used similarly in the four volumes of The Strategy of World Order, a revised, expanded version of the original Reader edited by Professor Mendlovitz in collaboration with Professor Richard Falk of Princeton and published by the Fund in 1966.

In adopting the Plan as a study material, the World Law Fund defined its first basic assumption: “… in all modem states legal institutions are used to control and regulate violence… law is almost a universal experience and can be appealed to as a rational method, for achieving order and even justice.”⁶

The use of the Mendlovitz materials in several disciplines and the variety of problem foci selected by the instructors led to the conclusion that the subject of world order, while maintaining its basic adherence to law as a source of control and justice, must give careful attention to the analysis of many interrelated problems and must extend itself far beyond the substance of disarmament and conflict resolution. These circumstances reinforced the conclusions derived from contacts with scholars and teachers in other countries.

Not unmindful of the complexities and conflicts inherent in the first basic assumption, Harry B. Hollins, Managing Director of the World Law Fund, began his task of launching a world-wide educational effort by testing its validity. During a trip to present translations of World Peace Through World Law to leaders and scholars of many countries and to elicit their reactions to it, he learned two significant lessons which profoundly influenced the guidelines for the operation of the Fund: first, that law as a conceptual basis for order does have some degree of universal meaning; and second, that no one plan and no single perspective on the problem of war will produce a workable solution for a complex, multi-cultural world in which the hierarchy of critical problems varies from nation to nation.

The recognition of these conditions led to the internationalization of the operation from the earliest stages. Scholars and educators from all areas of the world were enlisted to assist in the formulation and evaluation of programs and encouraged and assisted with the initiation of similar operations in their own countries. The exchange of course outlines and course syllabi among educators of several nations has enriched the resources for world order education while moving it further toward its goal.

The Fund has recently launched a project which has tremendous potential as the basis and vehicle for world-wide public discussion and offers the opportunity for academic examination of world order issues. The “Models Project,” which began as an attempt to overcome the limitations imposed by the existence of a single war prevention plan, may prove to be the single most important development since the publication of World Peace Through World Law.