Ann Arinze
Educator@ Peace Education Development Initiative.
Keywords – Peace Education,Peace, Pacifism, positive peace, negative peace, integration.
Content
- What is peace?
- What is peace Education?
- What is Conflict?
- Brief history of peace education
- Objectives of peace education
Introduction
Education for peace hopes to create in the human consciousness a commitment to the ways of peace and management of violent tendencies. Just like a doctor learns in medical school how to minister to the sick, students in peace education classes learn how to solve problem caused by violent. Social violence and warfare can be described as a form of pathology, a disease.Peace education try to inoculate students against evil effects of violence by teaching skills to manage conflicts non-violently and by creating a desire to seek peaceful resolution of conflicts.
Peace Education has taken different shapes around the world. At the beginning of the twentieth century in the United States and Europe people concerned about the advent of mechanized warfare began to educate the population in those countries about ways that wars, structural violence, direct violence and indirect violence could be outlawed. Peace Education started taking place informally throughout history as various cultures pass on to their progeny understandings about the way of peace. Every major religion has a peace message. And today major peace education programmes have been introduced into government owned schools.
What is Peace Education?
Peace Education is a learning process that draws out from people their instincts to live peacefully with others and emphasizes peaceful values upon which society should be based. Educators use their professional skills to tell their students about peace.The study of peace attempts to nourish those energies and impulses that make possible a meaningful and life enhancing existence.
Objectives of Peace Education
- PEDI Project will help young adults learn by bringing together personal and environmental experiences and help them manage their violent tendencies.
- PEDI Project will enrich or modify their knowledge, skills, values, attitudes, and behaviour and even world views.
- PEDI Project will help to achieve a peaceful co-existence with them and among us when peace has been planted in their consciousness.
- PEDI Project will implant love, planetary stewardship, global citizenship and human relations.
- PEDI Project will build shared values by networking similarly minded groups.
- PEDI Project with time will counteract violent images in popular culture and the bellicose behavior of politicians.
Peace has always been among humanity’s highest value.The most popular view is as an absence of dissension, dispute, violence, or war.Pacifism is the opposition to war and violence. The word Pacifism was coined by the French peace campaigner Emile Arnaud (1864 – 1921) and adopted by the peace activist at the tenth Universal Peace Congress in Glasgow in 1901.
Peace, however, is also seen as concord, harmony and tranquillity. It is viewed as peace of mind or serenity. It is defined as a state of law or civil government, a state of justice or goodness, a balance or equilibrium of Powers.
Such meanings of peace function at different levels. But when peace is opposed, it is called conflict. A state of mind in which a person experiences clash of opposing feelings or needs. It may refer to an internal state (mind) or to external relations (nation). Or it may be narrow in conception, referring to specific relations in a particular situation (like a peace treaty), covering a whole society (as in a world peace). The problem is, of course, that peace derives its meaning and qualities within a theory or framework.
All concepts of peace are defined within a theory or cognitive framework or what Peace Education initiative called perspective. The study of peace and conflict has grown exponentially since their initiation in Scandinavia, Europe about a half century ago by Johan Galtung. They have forged a trans disciplinary and professional identity different from security studies, political science and International Relations.Johan Galtung is widely acknowledged as the founder of peace studies and peace research. He has published extensively in these fields. He is currently the co-director of TRANSCEND, a global network of peace scholars and conflict transformers.
There are two aspects of peace according to Johan Galtung, known as positive and negative peace.The history of the two aspects of peace started in 1950 when peace research was too focused on direct violence like assault, fighting and was dominated by the North Americans. In 1960, Johan Galtung expanded the concepts of peace and violence to include indirect or structural. Peace Education is a research into the conditions for moving closer to peace or atleast not drifting to violence.
Negative peace = absence of violence and war.
Positive peace = proper integration of all into the society.
Difference between negative and positive peace.
The major characteristics of negative and positive peace can be summarized as follows;
Negative peace: Absence of violence, pessimistic, curative, peace not always by peace means.
Positive peace: Structural integration, optimistic, preventive, peace by peaceful means.
Peace Education Initiative has sought to project positive peace as higher and ideal than negative peace and also the best prevention against violence. Peace shouldn’t deal with narrow vision of ending or reducing violence at a direct or structural level but seek to understand conditions for preventing violence. For this to happen, peace and violence need to be looked at in totality at all levels of human organisation.
Conclusion
The knowledge of negative and positive peace remain the foundation of peace theory and are very valuable when the study of peace is evolving building knowledge about peace to peace training and peace education.