• Violence can be perpetuated through structural and

institutional systems, ideologies, or directly through war and environmental destruction.

• Peace education has a international, worldly orientation that seeks to understand root causes of violence and discover solutions

• Paulo Freire's The Pedagogy of the Oppressed

• Sociologist Johann Galtung, a founder of the discipline of Peace Studies

• UNESCO Framework on Peace Education

• Focus on processes, not outcomes, and nurture inherent curiosity and wonder in children. Move away from out-come based measures like standardized testing.

• Interdisciplinary and place-based, emphasizing cultural and planetary inter-connectedness.

• Promote inquiry and imagination; embrace the unknowns and continuous learning. Classrooms should be student-focused, instead of teacher-focused.

• Always question assumptions.

• Relational Existence

• Global Consciousness

Human Relationship

Global Citizenship

• We are all responsible for the planet on local and global levels because we are of the Earth and all of its components are within us. We are not separate from the Earth but deeply dependent on it. 

• We must see all life (including things typically deemed “non-living” or abiotic) as fundamentally one or united, so that we don’t continue to fall into a trap of separation and superiority. 

Holistic Earth Care serves to mitigate the effects of structural, cultural, and direct violence as they show up in a culture that views the planet as a commodity to be exploited. We all have a responsibility for the interconnected web of life of which we are a part. 

• We see ourselves as relational beings. 

• We acknowledge that our current state of brokenness is a result of creating hierarchies in relationships, and of deeming certain peoples as beneath the need for relation. 

• We must seek to right the wrongs of the past by deferring to historically marginalized voices, many of whom demonstrate a relational spirituality and/or model of living in relational community with all beings. 

• We must see and honor the inherent worth and dignity of all beings and act in accordance with their rights, whether humans, other mammals, or other forms of being. 

Relational Existence diminishes manifestations of violence by inviting us into mindful, compassionate relationships via authentic communication.

• We see ourselves as co-travelers of the cosmos and thus must live with a sense of responsibility to all inhabitants of said cosmos—not just those who think or look like us, or those who live next door. 

• Climate Change, for example, has proven that local choices—especially lives lived in excess that require fossil fuels and extractive, exploitative capitalism—have global impacts. 

Global Consciousness can counteract the manifestations of violence by expanding our understanding of the human condition and the nature of interdependent existence.  

In Latin American countries with histories of colonialism and authoritarianism, peace education is based on the examination of personal experiences. This promotes "social literacy," social consciousness, and social action.

One of the worst immaterial sufferings under White-supremacist, Christian-nationalist, colonial-capitalism is the severely limited opportunity to build community with one another. This lack of community is one of the ways that the status quo and systems of violence are upheld, because without mass solidarity it is difficult to counter oppression. Education opportunities that focus on intentional covenantal community building, the co-construction of knowledge, restorative justice practices, and begin to reorient power relations within the classroom, help to foster the skills needed for positive peace. Drawn from the work of Paulo Friere, peace education focuses on building a “critical consciousness” (Bartlett p.2) and the skills necessary to change the structures of society. These skills of thoughtful “deliberation, justification, and critique” are necessary for all citizens to possess because “political liberty is contingent upon” these skills (Snauwaert p. 8.) Peace education can also entail competency-based learning in which community values are “articulated and negotiated” (Reardon p.72) in order to “imagine and conceptualize “alternative realities” (Reardon p. 71) of being. By modeling these seemingly distant possibilities within the classroom, peace education can explore the “preferred alternative states that need to be worked towards” (Hicks p. 171.) Through these conceptualizations, peace education helps people to more concretely understand what they might advocate for. In a society that accepts oppressive systems it is challenging to imagine alternative possibilities, but peace education holds the ability to model those possibilities while building the capacity for change through skills such as reflection, critique, responsibility, curiosity, and stewardship.

Works Cited

Bartlett, L. (2008) Paulo Freire and Peace Education.

Hicks, D. (2004). Teaching for Tomorrow: How can futures studies contribute to peace education. Journal of Peace Education 1(2).

Reardon, B. (1986) Comprehensive Peace Education. TC Press. Chapter 5: The Fundamental Purposes of a Pedagogy of Peace.

Snauwaert, D. (2020). The peace education imperative: a democratic rationale for peace
education as a civic duty, Journal of Peace Education.