Baron Pierre de Coubertin lived for 74-years—37 years in the 19^thcentury and 37 years in the 20^thcentury, and as a result he saw many grand shifts on the world stage.  When he was born in Paris in 1863, there were more than 5,000 horse drawn carriages serving as the main mode of transportation in the city; when he died in 1937, international air transport had served to further the idea that our world had become a global village.  Like the times we’re living in now, the pace of change accelerated throughout his life. While he believed that humanity would ultimately find a path to a better world, he recognized the crisis at hand between the nations in 1936, when he wrote his “Message to the Olympia-Berlin Torchbearers.”  It is clear he was trying to strike a tone of optimism about the future by labeling the growing international animosity a crisis of education. 

“We are living in a grand age, for all around us we see the unexpected. As the shape of Europe and the new Asia begins to appear as though through a morning mist, it would seem that at long last, humanity will recognize that the crisis in which it finds itself is, above all, a crisis of education.”