In the earliest years of his long international sport campaign, Baron Pierre de Coubertin saw the possibilities of linking education, sport and peace in a triad that had the potential to change the world.  As he observed the work of the First Universal Peace Congress at the 1889 Paris Universal Exposition, he was impressed with the ideas and proposals advocating the marriage of peace and education.  He wrote about the principles espoused that year in the article, “Education for Peace,” which was published in La Réforme Sociale.

“One of the ways they have found to spread the habit of arbitration in ordinary practice involves education. The following resolution was issued quite recently by the Congress of the League of Peace: ‘All States will implement a method in schools through which all questions and disputes that arise between students are regularly submitted to an arbitration panel comprising students freely elected by their classmates.’ This idea has already begun to flourish in free America. It is ingenious and in keeping with a great principle that is too often ignored: the only way to change the man is to change the child.”