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To view an interview of Jacques Mühlethaler (in French) click here
The founder of EIP, Jacques Mühlethaler was born in 1918 of Swiss and French parents. He was a soldier in a French Alpine Fighter unit during the German occupation of World War II, but despite his war medal, he rejected the legitimacy of the Vichy government. During the conflict, he lost a brother on the battlefront, and in 1958 during the Algerian war, he lost his other brother, a surgeon.
In 1941 he settled in Switzerland and five years later founded a publishing house that distributed French school textbooks. Deeply shocked at the way in which school history books tended to glorify war, he decided to undertake a world tour in order to advocate to political authorities that schools should serve to encourage and promote peace - hence his motto, "fewer guns, more pencils".
At the beginning of the 1960s, Jacques Mühlethaler published the « universal principles of civic education », and in 1967 he founded EIP. In 1975, he undertook a hunger strike in order to heighten public awareness of the huge sums spent on arms and of the consequent lack of money for education on peace and tolerance. His writings, conserved in the EIP archives in Geneva, recall his meetings with the major world players of the day from both the East and the West. These writings are pervaded by the conviction that political authorities should be urged to include the teaching of human rights and peace as part of education.
Jacques Mühlethaler was a commited activist who gathered around him a diverse group of people who formed the core of what is today the oldest international NGO dedicated to human rights and peace education. Until his death in 1994, Jacques Mühlethaler continued to contribute to the success of EIP. He encouraged lone activists to group together in national branches. Today, EIP is active on every continent.
For more information on this, please refer to Bulletin École et paix de 1994
