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Peace education

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Peace education is the process of acquiring the values and knowledge, and developing the attitudes, skills, and behaviors to live in harmony with oneself and others. Peace education is also an activity where teachers strive to get people (mostly youngsters) to reflect on the benefits of peace to themselves and everyone else, so that they will be willing to behave in a peaceful manner.

Values

Peace education is based on a philosophy of nonviolence, love, compassion, trust, fairness, cooperation, respect and a reverence for the human family and all life on our planet. It is a social practice with shared values to which anyone can make a significant contribution. Just how an individual can make a contribution is a challenge facing peace educators.

Knowledge

At the core of the knowledge that peace education imparts is the understanding of the dynamics of groups. Human beings live in groups: families, hunting groups, tribes, villages, cities, castes, guilds, armies, trade unions, political parties, classes (school and social), empires, nation states, confederations, international organisations, gender groups, humankind, to name just a few.

Within and between groups you can always find two sorts of relationship: competition and cooperation. Competition often leads to a rise in efficiency (be it in sports or in the economy), but it can also be disastrous when it leads to the destruction of one or maybe all of the competitors. Cooperation also leads to a rise in efficiency and it can also be disastrous when carried to the extreme. For example, an army demands perfect cooperation at the cost of the individual. Another example of extreme cooperation is assembly-line work or the cooperation demanded by totalitarian states.

Most of the time both relationships are at work at the same time and on the same level. A difficult question for peace educations is to help people see the benefits of competition and co-operation and to stop either behaviour going to extreme. In the classroom we cooperate in a project but we are also competing: who is fastest and who has the best ideas. Two football teams compete of course but they also cooperate by sticking to the rules.

Peace education should enable people to understand what inner structures and what outer conditions make a group (or an individual) aggressive and lead to disastrous forms of competition or cooperation. For example, Why do gladiators strive to kill each other? Because they hate each other so much? No, because they are slaves, and if they do not fight to the death, they will be killed by their masters (outer conditions). An example for inner structures is a tribe of egalitarian farmers that has no need for more land than they can cultivate. There is a limit to their aspirations, they are not expansionist. On the other hand, an empire based on tribute taken from the peasants is expansionist because the king and his warriors want and need more peasants for economic efficiency and military power.[citation needed]

Whilst peace education


Peace education must enable us also to understand the interaction between the group and the individual. How does the group form the individual, how does the group put certain individuals in certain positions, and how on the other hand can the individual influence the group.[citation needed]


One view of peace education is that it must comprise the basics of anthropology, history, psychology, economics and political science. The basic dynamics of biological evolution are similar to the dynamics of culturals/social evolution. Peace education should understand humankind as a part of nature and a dynamic organism that is constantly changing and developing.[citation needed] However, another more simpler view is that peace education is a practical activity involving socratic dialogue that gets people to reflect on their values and thereby want to behave peacefully.[1]


Peace education must impart knowledge that enables the individual to take part in democratic decisions on all levels, to have an informed opinion about the actions of politicians and economic decision makers and to cooperate with others to influence political and economic decisions on all levels. Peace education will not be content with giving people just as much education as they need for their trade or their career.[citation needed]

Skills

The core of all skills peace education imparts must be the skill of communication. Communication lies at the heart of mutual trust. This does not mean communication through words only, but also through actions. (How will my actions be understood?) The prisoner's dilemma is caused by the impossibility of communication. Communication is the prerequisite for mediation, contracts, all sorts of agreements. Other skills are: Organizing groups, nonviolent action, humanitarian intervention, speaking different languages, moving in different cultures, development of inner peace through meditation, tai chi, yoga, various activities and mutual help.[citation needed]

Major Questions in Peace Education

At first glance, peace education seems a sensible activity to promote and seems to have a body of knowldge bhind it. However, as Robb[2] points out there are some difficult questions facing peace educations. For example:

  1. If a thug is violently attacking me or another person, do I ot have the right and duty to use force to stop the thug?
  2. If a large powerful nation invades a smaller nation to take its resources, are we not morally obligated to help the smaller nation and repulse the invaders?
  3. If a dictator decides to kill a section of his people just because he doesn't like them, are we not morally obliged to stop him - by force if necessary?

There are additional methodological questions[3] which peace educators grapple with, such as:

  1. How do we actually do peace education?
  2. How do we know if our peace education effoirts are working?
  3. If we already have values education, moral education and religious education, is peace education necessary?

Notes

  1. ^ Robb, B 2008: http://www.valueseducation.co.uk/articles/article-peace-education.html
  2. ^ Robb, B 2008: http://www.valueseducation.co.uk/articles/article-peace-education.html
  3. ^ Robb, B 2008: http://www.valueseducation.co.uk/articles/article-peace-education.html

See also

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