13 Facts About Peace education

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

Koichiro Matsuura, the immediate past Director-General of UNESCO, has written that peace education is of "fundamental importance to the mission of UNESCO and the United Nations".

Johan Galtung suggested in 1975 that no theory for peace education existed and there was clearly an urgent need for such theory.

James Page has suggested that a rationale for peace education might be found in virtue ethics, consequentialist ethics, conservative political ethics, aesthetic ethics, and care ethics.

Peace education programs centered on conflict resolution typically focus on the social-behavioural symptoms of conflict; they train individuals to resolve inter-personal disputes through negotiation and mediation.

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Peace education programs centered on democracy education typically focus on the political processes associated with conflict.

Peace education programs centered on raising awareness of human rights typically focus on policies that humanity ought to adopt to move closer to a peaceful global community.

Some approaches to peace education start from psychological insights, which recognize the developmental nature of human psychosocial dispositions.

Peace education, he says, must focus on the healthy development and maturation of human consciousness through assisting people to examine and transform their worldviews.

Critical Peace Education is an emancipatory pursuit that seeks to link education to the goals and foci of social justice - disrupting inequality through critical pedagogy.

The project of critical peace education includes conceiving of education as a space of transformation where students and teachers become change agents that recognise past and present experiences of inequity and bias, and where schools become strategic sites fostering emancipatory change.

Toh Swee-Hin observes that each of the various streams of peace education "inevitably have their own dynamics and 'autonomy' in terms of theory and practice".

Second, for whatever reason, the field's scholarship in the form of theorizing, research and program evaluation badly lags behind practice… In the absence of clarity of what peace education really is, or how its different varieties relate to each other, it is unclear how experience with one variant of peace education in one region can usefully inform programs in another region.