Peace Education

Peace education is a broad, interdisciplinary field of study. It includes both immediate goals, conflict resolution within a school or community, and long-range goals, sustainable international peace and justice. There is also some distinction between the general theory and practice of peace education and the more specific academic discipline of peace studies, which analyzes the peace process and tends to have a geopolitical focus.

Peace education can be viewed as philosophy, process, and curriculum. It is an educational philosophy in that it advocates and teaches nonviolence, compassion, and respect. It is a process in that the methods employed develop peacemaking skills such as listening, reflecting, problem solving, cooperation, and conflict resolution. It is curriculum in that it explicitly teaches those skills along with related historical and civic content.

Peace education can also be considered a strategy for achieving domestic and international peace. Peace education, in contrast with strategies such as a strong defense, pacifism, or political strategies, seeks to establish a long-term change in human behavior. Peace educators maintain that most human beings are presently taught to rely on militarism and use of force to resolve conflict and that learning alternatives to violence will result in a different way of thinking and behaving.

The history of peace education begins in earnest in the 19th century with the advent of modern warfare. As the American Civil War introduced the machine gun, ironclad battleships, and other weapons of destruction and death, peace clubs sprang up across college campuses in the West. Non-governmental organizations were early advocates and gathered on May 18, 1889, in The Hague, Netherlands, for the world's first peace convention, a day since commemorated as peace day. Another conference in 1907 sought to place limits on war. After World War I, in the guise of education and international understanding, peace education focused on cultural differences and political systems; after World War II, transforming into education for world citizenship, it began to focus on the politics practiced by the dominant world powers, at that time the United States and the USSR.

In 1953, the United Nations Educational, Social, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), whose central mission is the promotion of education for peace, human rights, and democracy, inaugurated the Associated School Project to study critical world issues in schools, noting that since wars begin in the minds of people, it is in the minds of people that the defense of peace must be built. In the United States, the peace education efforts increased in reaction to World War I and World War II but remained an extension of international relations. In the 1940s, academics—such as Johan Galtung, considered the father of peace studies—shifted focus from war to the nature of peace and to the creation of peace studies as an academic discipline in higher education.

While it might be argued that peace studies have been around for centuries, it did not become a formalized field of study in higher education until 1948, when a peace studies program was instituted at Manchester College in Indiana, a liberal arts school affiliated with the Church of the Brethren. The next program would be 8 years later at the University of Michigan. These programs were innovative, and the spread of peace studies would be slow and not accepted as a formal institutionalized field of study for another 10 to 16 years. Interest in them would cycle with the prevalence of wars and conflicts.

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