WHAT IS EDUCATION FOR PEACE?
Education for peace is about creating a culture for peace. The UN Culture of Peace resolution of 1999 declared that now is the time to create a culture of peace between all of the UNs member countries, and declared the years 2001 to 2010 to be the UN's decade for a culture for peace and nonviolence for all the children of the world. All countries that have signed this resolution have committed themselves to carry out active peace education.
Competence in peace has three elements: knowledge, attitudes and skills.
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Knowledge for peace includes facts about disarmament, the environment and sustainable development, human rights, other cultures and religions and on military consumption and alternative ways of managing and transforming conflicts. These must be included in the school curricula.
Skills for peace include communication and conflict management skills, crisis analysis, prioritisation, verbal and written reporting skills, teamwork skills and more. These must be trained up, partly through the educational methods chosen and the routines in the school, but also through well directed training.
Attitudes for peace include solidarity, curiousity and interest in the other, and the desire to promote democratic solutions, justice and equality.
These are created through the educational methods and through open debate.
- As a theme in a subject (for example nuclear disarmament in Natural History or Science)
- As a subject in itself (for example optional subjects in peace, conflict management and transformation or human rights)
- As a theme day or week
- As an attitude that lies under all the activities carried out by a school or college (Education for Peace implicit in the culture and daily life of the school).
In many schools today
there is a great deal of good work aimed at nonviolence, peaceful resolution of conflicts, human rights, environment and devlopment, democratic participation etc. Peace education should run like a silver thread through a the entire development of every pupil; all these themes should be included and put in the greater context of peace education.
For the educational platform for peace, see here
Often we start a workshop by asking our participants to say what the word "peace" means to them. The answers are extremely varied, covering the whole scale from "the absence of war and conflict" to "an active state of cooperation and care", from "international security" to "inner peace". In a sense everyone of these definitions is true: one leads to the other, since it is the attitudes and skills of the individuals that shape the society.
Peace is not a passive state, but something that needs to be worked on in order to be maintained. A society is made up of people with different wishes, resources, ideologies and cultural preconditions. Modern civilisation is in rapid development, and from change often follows fight for resources. An active concept of peace looks at how the interaction between people and peoples can take place without leading to violent confrontations. The mechanisms behind violent confrontations are often rather similar, whether you talk of conflicts between people or nations.
Peace education is a wide concept and includes all activities that work for a peaceful, non-violent society. The UN Declaration for a Culture of Peace lists 8 action points. The first of these is universal establishment of Peace Education. UNESCO defines peace education with 6 pillars: freedom, equality, solidarity, tolerance, respect for nature, and shared responsibility. For this reason peace education must be very broadly applied and cover a full spectrum of how to improve conditions within the class or family, through the local and regional, and up to the global level. Education will thus include everything from personal skills in conflict management and active democratic participation to knowledge of the political, historical and social processes in world society.