Education for a culture of peace – the means to quality education
This concept, invoking the culture of peace rather than peace, has three advantages:
- It evokes close relationships rather than distant wars.
- As a result, it can be better appreciated by those who are wary of peace or in favor of just wars.
- It explains its broad definition based on the human values and skills needed to build a shared culture of living well together.
Education for a culture of peace goes beyond non-violent conflict management and war prevention:
- ECP (1) strengthens students’ human, social, intercultural and eco-citizen skills in their interactions, as well as their capacity for reflection and discernment, all of which are an integral part of quality education.
- It brings the human values that underpin these skills and enable us to live and act in harmony.
- It teaches them to be proactive and discerning.
- It teaches them how to anticipate, prevent and refute violence, to understand that even unconscious discrimination and exclusion can lead to radicalization.
- ECP trains teachers in pedagogical practices and postures that develop listening, dialogue and collaboration between students. Students are thus encouraged to find solutions collectively, as one of the strategies for learning the disciplines, and thus acquire the skills that serve peace. It trains them in positive postures, i.e. benevolent and rewarding, with positive authority, i.e. firm, nurturing, and without disciplinary violence. These postures are designed to ensure a learning climate where students can develop their self-esteem and academic success because they feel stimulated and at peace. A school climate conducive to learning is fundamental if we are to hope for inclusive and equitable quality education.
- It’s based on a positive, joyful philosophy of life in unity.
- Its goal is peace and the culture of peace as standards.
- ECP is the form of education par excellence that makes possible quality educationand reduced absenteeism.
1. Education for a culture of peace brings meaning to students
Children and young people are searching for meaning, all the more so as schools do not adequately meet this fundamental need. By working on their human values, their identity and their role in humanity, education for a culture of peace enables children to find their place, to feel recognized and to have a real goal : to live in harmony and to contribute themselves to this harmony in their lives and in the world.
2. Education for a culture of peace* teaches the education of being, the interaction skills and discernment
It develops human values, peace skills (human, social, intercultural and civic) and the ability to discern.
It teaches mutual respect and esteem, sensitive listening, dialogue, help, conflict resolution, convergence and appeasement. It works on attitudes and behaviors towards others, the perception of one’s own identity and the control of emotions such as fear and anger, because all these notions are key to building a culture of peace.
It’s an education in socialization with the aim of peace, and an awareness of the human rights of others.
3. Education for a culture of peace teaches how to prevent and refute violence
It enables us to understand the different forms of violence, to perceive its premises in others and in ourselves, to respond to it with peace reflexes, i.e. with calming behaviors, and to recognize and resist the signs of manipulation leading to violence.
This education leads to respect for the first and third of human rights: the right to life, security, dignity and fraternity – and all the human rights that flow from them.
It is this sense, too, that leads to respect for all human rights.
4. Education for a culture of peace trains teachers to transmit this education
By their practice
Peace education uses contemporary pedagogies that reinforce the culture of peace through experimentation and active practice, which lecturing, based on passive memorization, cannot achieve. Thus, active participation, cooperation, democratic decision-making, resoluteness* and proactive involvement* are fundamental to strengthening students’ peace skills.
Through their posture
She teaches teachers how to transmit the culture of peace through coherent postures:
– a personal attitude based on the human values and skills taught to children,
so that every student feels respected and appreciated
– a pedagogical posture of benevolent, rather than authoritarian and cold, support which,
beyond memorization, encourages learning through shared reflection and the practice
of interaction.
5. Education for a culture of peace is based on a philosophy of life that is positive, joyful and in unity
It raises awareness of the good that comes from peace: through the joy felt when a peace process succeeds, through the joy that radiates from the feeling of unity between people, and more broadly, through the joy that comes from the feeling of unity with humanity and the living world as a whole.
6. Education for a culture of peace aims at peace as a norm in the broadest sense
It applies to and positively influences family, school and social, intercultural, interreligious and ethnic, political, geopolitical and environmental interactions.
This is the standard that will govern respect for human rights.
7. Education for a culture of peace makes quality education a reality
Through these various means, education for a culture of peace makes qualityeducation a reality, as defined by UNICEF in 2013:
Quality education has been defined as equipping people with the skills, knowledge and behaviors to:
– obtain decent work;
– live together as active citizens nationally and globally;
– understand and prepare for a world where environmental degradation and climate change pose a threat to sustainable lifestyles and livelihoods;
– understand their rights.
Source: Making Education a Priority in the Post-2015 Agenda, UNICEF, Sept 2013, p 28.
(See also the definition given by CONFEMEN (Conférence des ministres de l’Éducation des États et gouvernements de la Francophonie) in 2012: quality education).
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* as promoted by Graines de Paix.
** Practices developed by Graines de Paix.
1. Abbreviation for Education for a culture of peace.
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Declaration of Human Rights (articles 1 and 3)
Art. 1
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
Art. 3
Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.
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Find out more about Grains of Peace’s peace education program.
Find out more about the specific peace skills Graines de Paix develops in peace education:
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human and social skills
(psychosocial skills – personal and interpersonal) -
intercultural skills (psychosocial skills in an intercultural environment)
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citizenship skills and civility (towards the collective good and the community)
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critical and pacifico-critical skills (cognitive abilities to discern influences that could lead to convergence, and to distance oneself from influences that could lead to divergence, or even extremist choices).