The coronavirus, now enveloping the world in an unprecedented health crisis, undermines economies, exacerbates all other global problems, and adds suffering to the vulnerable throughout the world. COVID-19 is likely the first of repeated pandemics to be experienced in an already frighteningly uncertain future. As peace educators, we know that we cannot deny or retreat from the fear, but take hope and action to engage in the learning we believe to be the best and most effective response to the full range of threats to our planet. This crisis is an opportunity to formulate questions that lead us into authentically new, fresh forms of learning, unprecedented inquiries, truly distinct, but still derived from those we have for some time employed in our attempts to elicit visions of and plans for a preferred world. It is time, as well, for a truly new vision. Toward the conceptualization of that vision, the GCPE is posting this series, “Corona Connections: Learning for a Renewed World.”
An overlooked element in the COVID experience is how it can lead us into reflections on the human connections that carry us through the suffering, giving us an actual physical sense of being members of one human family, capable of caring for each other, as we must if the family is to survive. This post is a vivid instance of such an experience.
This article, co-authored by an African feminist, alerts us to the cooptation of the women’s movement that enables the structures of power to resist the substantive and systemic change required to achieve human equality.
Tony Jenkins argues that COVID-19 reveals that “peace education needs to bring greater emphasis to the future – more specifically, to envisioning, designing, planning and building preferred futures.”
Countries with low human development are facing the brunt of school lockdowns, with more than 85 percent of their students effectively out of school by the second quarter of 2020, according to a United Nations policy brief on the impact of COVID-19 on education.
Read the full transcript of UN Secretary-General António Guterres’s Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture 2020 speech “Tackling the Inequality Pandemic,” where he outlines a vision of a new social contract and a Global New Deal.
Previous articles in our Corona Connections series have focused mainly on the injustices and dysfunction of global structures that have been made undeniably evident by the pandemic. In this article, we call the attention of peace educators to the fact COVID has made many of those injustices more severe.
This Corona Connection further explores the human suffering of the most vulnerable imposed by the unjust global economic structures that COVID-19 reveals and exacerbates, and further examines the imperative and effectiveness of immediate and local action when governments fail to act.
This Corona Connection introduces the Alps-Adriatic Manifesto, a declaration of regional trans-border collaboration and civic intention. This Manifesto establishes “goals and processes of transcending separations and alienations that corrupt the peace possibilities in present international structures.” We share this Manifesto as a potential learning framework suitable to a cosmopolitan vision of peace and global citizenship education.
In this Corona Connection, Asha Hans reflects on the militarist response to COVID-19 in India, illustrating the interrelationships among the multiple “normal” injustices this pandemic has laid bare, showing how they are manifestations of a highly militarized security system. She also invites educators to begin the pedagogic imagining and structuring of a preferred future.
In this global call to action, the Early Childhood Peace Consortium entreats governments, policymakers and community leaders to safeguard the increasingly undermined rights of young children living in fragile contexts and to prioritize investment in their survival, development and protection.
Prior to the COVID-19 crisis, 258 million children and youth of primary- and secondary school age were already out of school and now school closures have affected the learning of more than 1.5 billion children and youth across 188 countries.
In this Corona Connection, we explore how racism is deeply rooted in American culture and psyche, allowing for multiple harms inflicted through white privilege. Unless and until white Americans honestly confront and acknowledge the advantages conferred by nothing more than being born into white skin, and accept the personal and social challenge of eliminating that privilege, there can be no authentic reconciliation and social cooperation among all Americans.