Peace Education: Its Nature, Nurture and the Challenges It Faces

Abstract

The culture of peace envisioned by the United Nations calls on people to be educated (or socialized) to see themselves as a peaceful people with norms that emphasize cooperation and the resolution of conflicts by dialogue, negotiation, and nonviolence. This can be achieved …when citizens of the world understand global problems, have the skills to resolve conflicts and struggle for justice non-violently, live by international standards of human rights and equity, appreciate cultural diversity, and respect the Earth and each other. Such learning can only be achieved with systematic education for peace." (Hague Appeal for Peace Global Campaign for Peace Education, 1999). More specifically, people are to be educated (or socialized) to see themselves as a peaceful people with norms that emphasize cooperation and the resolution of conflicts by dialogue , negotiation, and nonviolence. The UN call for peace education suggests that education in general is important for the establishment of a culture of peace and that specific sorts of peace education may be of particular importance. These include the expectation that children, from an early age, should benefit from education about the values, attitudes, modes of behavior, and ways of life that can enable them to resolve any dispute peacefully and in a spirit of respect for human dignity and of tolerance and nondiscrimination (53/243, Declaration and Program of Action on a Culture of Peace). These goals are both universal and very general, as they are intended to apply to a wide range of social and political contexts from countries as diverse as Kosovo and Canada, Sri Lanka and Peru, Cyprus and France. This generality needs to be examined in light of two limitations: First, it glosses over profoundly different kinds of peace education. Second, it implicitly assumes that education for human dignity and human rights, democracy, and nonviolence translates into situational-specific, context-appropriate behaviors and actions. As for the diversity of peace education programs, one can speak of at least three major classes of programs. One class consists of programs designed to change the way specific groups in conflict relate to each other, demystifying the adver-sary's images and attempting to understand its culture, point of view, and humanity