　WASHINGTON [May 2, Kyodo News Service] ― The U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige on May 2 in a talk with Atsuko Toyama, Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, who was visiting Washington, showed a positive attitude toward rejoining the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), which the country had left in 1984 disapproving of the management and policy of the organization. He said, “We hope to return in the near future.”　It was made public by Minister Toyama in her press interview.　
　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　[May 4 morning edition of the Asahi, May 3 TV news of NHK, etc.]
　

　It has been already seventeen years since the United States withdrew from UNESCO.　Britain and Singapore followed suit, but Britain came back in 1997 under Prime Minister Tony Blair.　President Clinton told UNESCO in 1995 that he was prepared to restore American membership, and Koichiro Matsuura, since he was elected director general of UNESCO in the autumn of 1999, has been urging Washington to rejoin the organization.
　
　As those who are engaged in the nongovernmental UNESCO movement,

we expect the United States to rejoin UNESCO as soon as possible.
　We’d like all Americans to recall that the famous words in the preamble of the Constitution of UNESCO “since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed” are in fact the words polished by an American poet Archibald MacLeish.　Among the people who got together to establish UNESCO, MacLeish was one of the U.S. representatives.　We’d like Americans to remember with pride the greatness of the poet who, refining the draft that the British Prime Minister Clement Atlee had made quoting from “The General Epistle of James, Chapter 4” in the New Testament, expressed the idea in such a beautiful and lofty tone as a crystallized UNESCO spirit.　We’d like Americans to inherit that spirit.　Together with American friends we wish to recite and keep firmly in mind these beautiful words that will hopefully bring peace to the world.　We earnestly hope that the United States will fill as soon as possible the great void left for the past seventeen years that it has been out of UNESCO, and contribute to world peace.