strategy

Educating for peace

Synonyms:

Teaching for peace
Developing innovative peace education approaches
Providing education for peace
Improving education for peace
Educating about peacemaking
Teaching peacemaking

Description:

Instructing people to live with a worldview that maximizes nonviolent, noncompetitive ways of resolving conflicts.

Implementation:

UNESCO assists in the planning the development of human rights teaching and education for international understanding, cooperation and peace. Proposals are made for revision of curricula, textbooks and other teaching materials and teacher training schemes, taking into account the results of research dealing with the themes of peace and human rights.

In 1991, the Institute of Peace in the USA began to teach peacemaking issues in classrooms. The Institute's priorities for 1995 include, increasing its effort in education and training, and in the specialized areas of skills training in conflict resolution. In a short time in the USA, over 300 violence prevention programmes and 100 conflict resolution curricula have been made available by anti-violence groups to middle and high schools.

Claim:

1. Our schools must be revered places of learning and their most valuable lessons are those that teach the wisdom of peace and the folly of war.

2. The educational dimension, in that it orientates action and indicates operational routes, is an essential part of the peace activist and human rights defender. It allows the acquisition of new resources of non-violent power, the capacity to promote shared fundamental values, creativity, planning, competence, co-operation and communication. The management of these resources of non-violent power is partly entrusted to people's diplomacy, which is distinct from, but not necessarily opposed to, the diplomacy of states.

Counter Claim:

Violence, competition and anger are natural, creative human responses, needing to be used appropriately in honouring the other as much as affirmation, cooperation, compassion and all other natural responses.

Broader:

Educating
Studying peace
Improving education
Building culture of peace
Developing new social innovations

Narrower:

Developing integrated educational programmes for peace, human rights and democracy

Constrained by:

Romanticizing peace

Facilitates:

Educating for international understanding

Facilitated by:

Training civil society
Educating about human rights

Problems:

Inadequate education for peace