Peace education

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Peace education is the process of acquiring the values, the knowledge and developing the attitudes, skills, and behaviors to live in harmony with oneself and with others.

1 Values
2 Knowledge
3 Skills
4 See also
5 External links

[edit] Values

Peace education is based on a philosophy that teaches 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. This is an interdisciplinary and w/holistic field embracing the development of peace consciousness on all levels and dimensions of being from within.

[edit] Knowledge

At the core of the knowledge that peace education imparts must be the understanding of the dynamics of groups. Human beings are living 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 -just to name 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: 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 ("Gemeinnutz geht vor Eigennutz"). Most of the time both relationships are at work at the same time and on the same level (In the classroom we cooperate in a project but we are also competing: who is fastest, who has the best ideas etc. Two football teams compete of course but they also cooperate by sticking to the rules). Peace education should enable us 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. E.g.: Q.: Why do gladiators strive to kill each other? Because they hate each other so much? A.: 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: A tribe of egalitarian farmers 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 can always use more peasants to pay them tribute which the king then can use to enhance the economic efficiency and the military power of his empire to subjugate even more peasants and so on.

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.

On the knowledge level peace education 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.

Peace education must impart a 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.

[edit] 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.