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Peace Education
The objective of peace education is to generate interdisciplinary efforts to develop strategies and programs aimed at reorienting the human race to the nonviolent resolution of conflict. As the new millennium begins, the specter of violence is commonplace, from the World Trade Center to the campus of Columbine High School, from bullying in the corridors of our schools to domestic violence at home. This entry provides a brief description of peace education, looks at its underlying theories, and offers a discussion of its marginalized status in the contemporary curriculum.
Some Basics
Peace education is grounded in two major assumptions: (1) conflict is inevitable and can often be fruitful and (2) people can be taught to resolve conflict without resorting to violence. Peace education includes strategies for resolving conflicts at various levels, ranging from individuals, to social groups, and even global conflicts.
The strategic dimension of peace education can be divided into three components. The first is peace keeping, which emphasizes tactics of conflict resolution to be utilized in conflict situations where violence has already happened or appears inevitable. The second is peace making, which emphasizes prophylactic approaches such as cooperative learning and cooperative discipline, violence prevention, multicultural education, and global education. The third is peace building, which explores policy alternatives designed to ameliorate structural violence grounded in social injustice. Galtung's theory of “structural violence” draws a distinction between direct and indirect violence, defining the latter as institutional arrangements structured to reduce the potential realized by victims of discrimination.
Peace education draws from interdisciplinary perspectives in subareas including conflict resolution, multicultural education, and global education. Conflict resolution ranges from interpersonal skills to mediation, arbitration, and negotiation. Multicultural education focuses upon the dialectical relationship between assimilation and cultural pluralism. Now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, a wave of immigration into the United States is projected to transform the currently dominant status of European Americans into the minority. The United States is witnessing an era of unprecedented racial diversity. These developments will require youth to master cultural competencies and to resolve racial prejudice. Multicultural education and its various permutations, such as “antiracist education” and “Whiteness studies” will contribute to the resolution of these contradictions. The dominance of transnational corporations and the global marketplace will also result in irreversible structural economic changes that will require a mastery of global education.
Theoretical Issues and Controversies
Negative versus Positive Peace
The most simplistic definition of peace, called “negative peace,” is the absence of violence. During the twentieth century the specter of nuclear annihilation appeared to be the most pressing issue to threaten world peace. The doctrine of “mutually assured destruction” (MAD) was put forth as a viable policy alternative and “negative peace” was the priority for many peace educators.
However, the construct of “positive peace,” grounded in recognition of the dialectical relationship between peace and justice, has recently gained ideological hegemony. This transformation is evident in the history of peace organizations, which began with the founding of the Peace Studies Association (PSA) in the 1980s, followed by the formation of the Consortium of Peace Research, Education, and Development (COPRED). The recent merger of PSA and COPRED into the Peace and Justice Studies Association (PJSA) is a symbolic manifestation of the ideological hegemony of “positive peace,” since the new title demonstrates the predominance of the issue of social justice as a factor of peace.
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