THE EDUCATIONAL PLATFORM OF PEACE EDUCATION
Peace education has not got its own accepted educational platform like other schools of educationsuch as Maria Montesorri or Rudolf Steiner. Peace education has still certain pedagogical characteristics based on the idea of human rights and justice, that makes it contradictory to teach peace in an authoritarian way. In order to make the youth of today promoters of non-violent conflict resolution and peace in the future it is necessary to equip them with critical, analytical capacities and with tolerance for different views and opinions. Peace education should therefore not be “fed to uncritical students”, or give the students ready-made conclusions for a better world. Instead, equality and dialogue between students, and between students and teacher are natural components of the learning process. Only if peace education is based on mutual dialogue, can one avoid accusations of being partial in one'sdescription of conflicts.
One of the (Norwegian) school’s most important tasks is to teach democracy. The promotion of democratic values should be reflected in the culture of the school. In this way we create a link between life and learning, practice and theory. In the same way as it is natural to teach about democracy in a classroom where the students have a vote and possess democratic rights and duties, it is similarly natural to teach peace in a classroom characterised by a just, non-hierarchical and cooperative structure.
For this reason most of the activities that are found on this page are inspired by the American pedagogue and philosopher John Dewey’s concept of “learning by doing.” This means that the students themselves are encouraged to participate actively in the teaching, in contrast to the more traditional “one-way communication” pedagogic. As a consequence the teaching role is changed and the teacher acts primarily as a sort of facilitator or guide. In the activities the students are introduced to a problem or a moral dilemma linked to one or more of the various educational categories.
An important rule is to base the activities within the students' frame of reference, and then draw lines from micro level to macro level. Peace education works best when it succeeds in revealing the links between the local and the global. The aim is to focus on the transference of knowledge, skills and attitudes between the personal level and the global, so that non-violent conflict resolution, dialogue and justice are not only reduced to abstract concepts (this is goes for Norwegian students – for students in conflict areas the lack of dialogue and justice are far from abstract – but a daily struggle!). It is important that the students living in peace today do not get the impression that violent conflicts are only something happening far away and that they are helpless in preventing it happening. To achieve peace we have to start with ourselves. It is therefore natural to start in the classroom and the students’ own experiences on the topic (for example from bullying and conflicts), and then to draw parallels to the local, national and international level.
During the quality testing and development process of the exercises we got lots of feedback from the students on the educational value of the programme. Below you find various quotesfrom students from different age ranges:
“ I think the role-play thing was very instructive. Very realistic!” Student, 3rd grade Manglerud College
“I liked the fact that we worked in groups. That we had a different type of education.” Student, 8th grade Lindeberg Secondary School
“It has been fun and interesting. Fun way of learning useful things. Better than normal education. Variation makes us learn better and useful things.” Student, 2nd grade Manglerud College.
As conclusion we point out that peace education to a large extent should base on a educationalplatform of student democracy, dialogical education, active learning and social interactivity. Peace or non-peace is elements in human coexistence and interaction, and similarly peace education must have a social profile where the students are not inhibited from learning coexistence with others.