Emina Frljak stresses that education can be a space for nurturing and developing cultures of peace or cultures of war. Peace education is a way to nurture our relationships with one another, save humanity, and take care of and preserve this Planet for those who will come after us since we are only guests for a short time.
“The institutions established to ensure peace and security in Europe fell short, and the failure of diplomacy led to war,” attendees said in a joint declaration. “Now diplomacy is urgently needed to end the war before it destroys Ukraine and endangers humanity.”
It is essential to involve people at the grassroots level in providing solutions to their challenges. Therefore, peace education should be made compulsory in schools in the region. This was one of the conclusions of the inaugural honorary lecture series on peace building in the Great Lakes Region hosted by the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Victoria University.
As Inequality continues to rise in California and across the nation, these workers showed that you don’t need to teach high school civics in order to educate about the Corrosive Effects of such economic disparity. Strikes, in short, can be a most powerful pedagogy.
Matt Meyer, Secretary General of the International Peace Research Association (IPRA), and Candice Carter, convener of the Peace Education Commission (PEC) of IPRA, respond to the reflections of Magnus Haavlesrud and Betty Reardon on the 50th anniversary of the PEC. Matt provides additional inquiries for future reflection and Candice shares insights on the significant and dynamic role the PEC has played within IPRA and the field of peace education at large.
Mental health is often swept under the rug as a social justice concern, however, the toll it takes on our youth and the injustices it brings is critical to explore. We must address this issue and its significant impact on our modern generation and its relationship to attaining justice.
Randi Weingarten, President of the American Federation of Teachers, outlines some of the many ways public schools have become a cultural battlefield even though they should be insulated from politics and culture wars so they are free to fulfill the fundamental purposes of public education: to help nurture the citizens of a democratic society.
According to the American Friends of the Parents Circle – Families Forum, “the Israeli government has recently announced its intention to restrict the Parents Circle’s public activities, starting with the removal of its Dialogue Meeting programs from Israeli schools…based on false allegations that the Dialogue Meetings [it often hosts in schools] denigrates IDF soldiers.” The dialogue meetings being challenged are led by two PCFF members, an Israeli and a Palestinian, who tell their personal stories of bereavement and explain their choice to engage in dialogue instead of revenge.
In this statement on the Ukraine war, PEACEMOMO observes that humanity has few options left. What the proxy war of global power confrontation in Ukraine shows is that we have hit the deadly cross-road of cooperation or common destruction.
In the context of the war in Ukraine, it should be the most natural thing in the world to try to find a way out of this catastrophe. Instead, only one path of thought is allowed – war for victory, which is supposed to bring peace. Peaceful solutions require more courage and imagination than belligerent ones. But what would be the alternative?
It’s 90 seconds till midnight. We are closer to the brink of nuclear war than at any point since the first and only use of nuclear weapons in 1945. While most reasonable people understand the need to abolish these weapons, few officials have been willing to suggest elimination as a first step. Fortunately, there is a voice of reason in a growing grassroots coalition: this Back from the Brink movement supports the elimination of nuclear weapons through a negotiated, verifiable time-bound process with the common sense precautionary measures necessary during the process to prevent nuclear war.
One of the most insidious characteristics of patriarchy is rendering women invisible in the public realm. It is a given that few, if any, will be present in political deliberations, and it’s assumed that their perspectives are not relevant. Nowhere is this more obvious or dangerous than in the functioning of the interstate system that the world community expects to address threats to global survival, the most comprehensive and imminent of which is the impending climate catastrophe. Ambassador Anwarul Chowdhury clearly illustrates the gender inequality problematic of state power (and corporate power) in the three well-documented articles on COP27 re-posted here (this being post 1 of 3). He has done a great service to our understanding of the significance of gender equality to the survival of the planet.