Her Excellency Mrs Vigdís Finnbogadóttir serves for the second time as a jury member for the Mondialogo School Contest 2005/2006 and participates in a panel debate on Education for Sustainable Development
06-10-2005 3:00 pm Her Excellency Mrs Vigdís Finnbogadóttir, former President of Iceland and UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador for the protection of minority languages, participated in a round table discussion on the UN Decade for Education for Sustainable Development, which was organized by the Swedish and German National Commissions for UNESCO in cooperation with the Education Sector on 6 October 2005 on the occasion of the 33rd General Conference of UNESCO. The discussion focused on “Promoting sustainability through education: Objectives, strategies, and UNESCO’s mission in the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development”. The Panel discussion brought together over 200 participants: representatives of Member States, National Commissions for UNESCO, NGOs and the Secretariat.
Her Excellency Mrs Finnbogadóttir argued that knowledge is a supremely renewable resource, which we need to protect, promote and share; the more we do in this area the more we gain. ESD is essentially about sharing, which people can learn in different ways: through acquiring basic education and life skills, understanding the need for sustainability; acquiring basic literacy or, as some do, acquiring ethical literacy. While local oral wisdom is extremely important for sustainable development, literacy is necessary to assume that one can bring local wisdom to play within the global community.
Furthermore, Her Excellency serves for the second time as a jury member for the Mondialogo School Contest 2005/2006, in which approximately 2,600 teams and 35,000 students from 138 countries will participate. The contest is part of the Mondialogo initiative, which seeks to promote intercultural dialogue, understanding and exchange among young people from all over the world and which gives them the opportunity to explore their cultural diversity together.
