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Chapter Three

STUDYING PEACE

 

Many of the difficulties about peace education can at least be seen more clearly when one obvious fact is recognized; to make peace, we have to give, even if peace will not always arrive because we have given. I am not thinking primarily of charity donations by the wealthy; a more relevant form of giving for the meeting of material needs is to work politically for a just system for the distribution of wealth. What we give to make peace is something of ourselves; peace­making forms of power combine elements of nurture, of truth-telling and of non-violent courage. These forms of power require a personal commitment and energy that is ultimately incompatible with coercion and seduction.

I conclude that only those who are living out such a personal commitment can teach peace; the prerequisites for teaching about peace are more academic and less personally stringent. It also follows that the gifts of students cannot be coerced without damage to gift and giver, which is an important constraint upon the study of peace. Ideals are necessary to guide our hopeful action, but they become damagingly coercive without the mediation of a personal freedom to choose appropriate actions. In the general imperfection of human affairs, no peace education will take place if we do not develop accep­table ways of exploring peace issues before the perfect teacher is found, and before students are totally protected from inadequate teaching. Anxieties about peace education in general seem to focus on these four areas: the worthiness of teachers, the manipulation of the minds of students, the acceptability of the general ideals and the acceptability of the methods and processes used.

It is crucially important that peace issues be studied in a genuinely open-ended way, both because we require objectively new and creative solutions to our conflicts and because each student must be accorded a real degree of freedom to explore peace issues in terms of their own perceptions and values. Peace education is, for me, any form of educational activity that explores questions about peace or con­tributes to the development of peace-making skills and personal understanding. In this sense, peace education can include all forms of good education.

 

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Teaching Peace in Schools

 

Common sense would suggest that the way to teach peace in schools is to devise a subject called peace, provide appropriate training for selected teachers and present the subject as a regular part of the school curriculum. Further reflection reveals serious weaknesses in this approach, particularly the lack of engagement of the gifts of teachers and students in constructing the study and the inadequacy of any isolated subject to address a full peace education agenda. In Vic­toria, the Ministry of Education appointed a task group that eventual­ly proposed a different approach. They called for the creation of a resource centre for teachers, the support of in-service work for teachers in this area and the importance of peaceful policies and practices in the everyday life of the school. This approach offers encouragement and support to teachers to work in this area and highlights the importance of what students learn from their daily experience; it also avoids the imposition of one model of peace education from above.

 

At some post-primary schools Peace Education is the basis of the school's overall policy. For example, instead of having school rules as such, the school develops a code of behaviour for all the school community.  The code is formulated by parents, students and teachers so that they are responsible for the maintenance of their agreement. This enables students to actively participate in their school community.1 (Martin Peake)

 

This way of introducing peace education is available in Victoria because it is consistent with the overall direction of educational change, which has been towards a cautious empowering of school com­munities. There has been a gradual devolution of powers to local school councils for government schools, an emphasis on encouraging participation by students in shaping their own learning and the exclu­sion of corporal punishment as a form of discipline. This last issue is an example of how policies consistent with peace education can be implemented in the practice of schools, so that the experience of students becomes more positive and peace-oriented.

Years ago, offending students (mostly boys) would be routinely punished by being beaten with a cane or strap. This practice is now prohibited in government schools (in which the majority of students study) as the result of a clear change in community attitudes. New forms of discipline are in operation, based on a more adequate understanding of student behavior, and a commitment to a more co­operative approach to learning. This change is still sufficiently recent for a conservative reversion to past practice to be advocated by some teachers and some parents. My point is that changes such as this do not happen without a widespread dissemination of the idea that it is both possible and desirable to do things very differently.

 

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Alternative discipline policies and practices are now widely established.  These typically involve substantial emphasis upon discussion with offenders (and their parents) and sanctions such as ex­pulsion from school.  For the majority of students whose bad behavior is based in some kind of dissatisfaction with their ex­perience of school, this method is capable of dealing with causes, where corporal punishment typically dealt only with the symptoms. This change of policy can therefore be seen as part of a move towards a more democratic and participatory form of schooling, even if some schools merely replace corporal punishment by some other form of punishment, and try to leave everything else unchanged. This one change does involve the commitment of a major social institution to non-violent and peace-oriented practices, and this will hopefully con­tribute to an improved experience of schooling by students and teachers alike.

Whether or not there is an explicit commitment to being a peaceful school, it is possible for teachers and students to study peace by asking peace-oriented questions and working on those questions. This can be done in relation to any subject (with imagination), or it can be done in special units and subjects about peace. "Peace Studies" usually refers to this latter possibility.2 In Australia, there are units of this explicit kind in a growing number of secondary and tertiary in­stitutions, but peace issues are more often introduced "across the cur­riculum" within a wide range of existing subjects.

Structured study involves us in systematic attention to complex and unresolved issues of method, fact and value. The concepts and methods generated by peace studies units become a resource for those teaching peace issues in other subjects. Controversy is inevitable, and desirable, in an area that threatens the absolute status of national sovereignty, and in which central concepts and methods are still being developed and established. Teaching peace requires us to find prac­tical answers to a wide range of issues, and should be seen as an aspect of peace research.3

No study of peace is likely to be productive in the absence of a peace-oriented method, which will develop from the commitment of the teacher to a dialogue with students about reality. We can make peace with each other in the classroom, and I don't expect much useful learning about peace to result from a non-peaceful process. There is much that is coercive in educational practice, and those concerned to promote a peaceful process will seek co-operative alternatives. Peace education does challenge the way our educational institutions operate, as well as the way our global, national and local institutions operate.

Every study has a pragmatic need for a limitation of focus, and the study of peace is no exception; but we should not confuse academic line-drawing with a proper understanding of the general concepts in­volved. While we clearly need definite topics and resources for study, the idea that a study of peace should be tightly confined to a narrow focus that excludes large sections of reality seems fatuous and

 

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counter-productive to me. Those who are reluctant to acknowledge and deal with difficult areas of experience would be well advised to avoid teaching about peace. If our study of peace remains satisfied with a general description of what peace would be like if we had it, or with a repetition of our nation's peace rhetoric, we shall probably gloss over all the painful, difficult and idiosyncratic features of our experience. Yet practical peace-making begins with the painful and difficult questions that resist easy answers, and it is experience in this kind of area which is likely to be worthy of study.

Even if we do start with a narrowly conceived study of peace in terms of, for example, conflict resolution, we need to accept that any form of conflict is potentially available for such study. Forms of con­flict can extend to the limits of human imagination (in identifying causes for grievance) and human intransigence (in refusing to desist from the pursuit of such causes). A focus upon conflict resolution can hardly count as narrow when it includes all forms of economic, domestic, aesthetic, academic, environmental and personal conflict in addition to the usual subject of politico-military conflict. Conflict resolution will in practice lead to reflections on non-violent forms of conflict resolution, to questions of justice, to questions about death, and to questions about how to secure a sustainable future for our threatened planet.

 

Peace Education Anxieties

 

A balanced approach to the development of peace education will require negotiation with any critic (at least, any critic who does not refuse rational debate). We need the contribution of the critics to a structure that can harmonize the conflicting energies that exist in our world. We need to experience success in peace-making at these more personal levels before we attempt such processes at wider levels. I see value in affirming as much as possible in the position of opponents, while stating the inevitable areas of disagreement clearly and fairly.

Critics of peace education are not wrong in detecting a challenge to the status quo from peace education. Those of us who identify such figures as Gautama Buddha, Socrates, Jesus, Mahatma Gandhi, Dorothy Day and Martin Luther King as competent teachers of peace can only agree that such a challenge is likely. Some critics appear to suggest that this fact is sufficient to discredit the whole enterprise; 4 but what is really involved is our personal choice of ideals and teachers, and our consequent judgement about whether, and in what ways, the status quo should be challenged. It is educationally desirable that students learn to recognize, and form a responsible opinion about, such challenges. There are very real differences of value about loyalty to our own nation-state, and the viability of a practical loyalty to global human society; educationally, the issue is how such differences can most appropriately be presented and worked through.

 

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The concern of critics about biased teaching should be respected, but not if it leads to attempts to remove any consideration of alternative value commitments from the school curriculum. "Indoctrination" and "propaganda" are terms that are bandied about loosely and unhelpfully. I distinguish between the deliberate manipulation of opinion by the systematic suppression of relevant information, which is propaganda strictly speaking, and the promulgation of a personal or collective view for consideration by others, which can be called propaganda only in a much weaker, and morally acceptable, sense. Similarly, indoctrination as the deliberate inculcation of a narrow world-view through coercive means (such as punishing the questioning of official teaching, or the exploitation of fear), seems morally reprehensible to me, quite apart from questions of its educational efficacy. Yet indoctrination can also mean the willing adoption of a total doctrinal package offered by a trusted teaching authority.

It seems to me that there are clearly reprehensible activities that warrant the pejorative use of these terms, but that there are also activities correctly referred to by these terms that are positive, and even essential to human survival and development. All speeches necessarily omit a vast amount of relevant information, and so all speakers are guilty of propaganda in the weak sense of this word. Similarly, all communities should welcome and introduce new people into their ways of life, and all such activities can properly be seen as indoctrination in a neutral, or even a positive sense. Speeches and introduction rituals should not be condemned until they descend into lies and coercion.

To avoid indoctrinating teaching, conventional wisdom has it that a balance should be pursued by presenting "both sides"! While this may occasionally be appropriate for a specific polarized debate in which there are only two arguments that are considered relevant, it is a bad habit to develop. For any real issue, there will be a large number of viewpoints, attitudes and possibilities; peace-making requires the development of the ability to invent new options, and to draw in a fuller set of conversation partners. Reality is never limited to two options, as the habit of structuring debates into" for and against" suggests. The appearance of such a limited choice masks all the other options already excluded. Our teaching should promote awareness that new options can always be sought, and that our imaginations play a central role in the invention, or recognition, of other possibilities.

As teachers, we avoid indoctrinating our students when we state, and mean, that we don't want them to adopt our limited perspectives and attitudes, and affirm what we can of the ways they are different from us. Where we cannot affirm, we need to be ready to state negatively critical judgements with the expectation of dialogue. We avoid indoctrination by teaching the limits as well as the validity of our information, and listening to our students so that their opinions can stand alongside our own. We avoid indoctrination by assessing students' work in terms of their starting-points and degree of relevant

 

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effort, not by whether they have affected to hold our opinions, in the guise of knowing facts that, on the basis of our interests and opinions, we have selected for study. Paradoxically, we avoid indoctrinating our students when we can inform them of our own opinions in such a way that these do not operate as an invisible limit of orthodoxy in our classes.

There is, and should be, an influence by teachers upon the thinking of students, and vice versa. Teachers must select information to present; conscious evaluation by students is needed, and this is most likely to happen when the information diverges from the existing views of the students. We all have unconscious filters which make it easy to ignore divergent information. If we are to become aware of our own filters, we need the help of those who see reality differently. Educationally, it seems essential to me that many views be positively and plausibly stated so that students are encouraged to consider them, and to feel the necessity for adopting a view of their own. Groups that spend their time denigrating their opponents make a negative and unattractive contribution that students rightly mistrust; indoctrination is avoided when all views that come forward receive a proper hearing, so that students are free to form opinions that are their own.

I am as concerned as the right-wing critics of peace education about indoctrination by teachers, but not because I am afraid of a situation in which students might end up in agreement with the views of their teachers. What students end up thinking is ultimately their own responsibility, and needs to be respected as such (which is not to say that it cannot also be questioned and challenged). My concern with teachers who do seek to indoctrinate their students is that this manipulative intention betrays the cause of peace (and truth). Narrow and manipulative teaching is inherently unpeaceful in seeking to control the thinking of students; such teaching creates enmity and distorts understanding. Narrowly based" answers" will not sustain world peace, and neither will indoctrinated people who have never learned to recognize elements of validity in opposing views.

A more specific anxiety about the study of peace has been with the use of realistic images of the horror of nuclear war. Whatever the intent of teachers, the most likely effect of the widespread use of such material is to drive people back into a conservative dependence upon their existing sources of security, where what peace-making requires is creativity and an ability to change. As peace educational material is very frequently oriented to the threats that we face, and therefore presents horrific information that heightens our fears, this question of the appropriate role of such material is of central importance.

 

Teaching About Horror

 

I vividly remember the first time that I saw War Game, the film made by Peter Watkins over twenty years ago. The film is an

 

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imaginative documentary about the likely effects of a nuclear attack upon Britain. It is really a collage of starkly presented fragments showing things such as the tensions that will surround a forced evacuation of cities, the pathetic inadequacy of attempts to follow official advice for preparations in the home against nuclear attack, the kinds of urgencies that will lead people to be caught in the open by an explosion even when they have received warning, the literal holocaust of a firestorm, the anarchy that would follow the partial or total breakdown of government and the hideous lack of life-supporting resources in the devastated territory. I felt physically ill after that viewing, and I had to spend a quiet afternoon to recover.

I had been shown a whole new dimension of our collective vulnerability, and I was caught in a vicious circle of knowledge and reflection that went something like this: "These things are quite horri­ble to contemplate. I am fearful lest they happen. I want to alleviate my fear and anxiety by removing the source of this threat. But the ability to launch nuclear death and destruction is in the hands of powerful leaders of nations other than my own, who are hardly likely to notice whatever I may say or do. So because action seems to be denied me, I need to find some other way of alleviating my fear and anxiety, which have now increased with my recognition of my own powerlessness. No other action that I can think of seems any more hopeful than influencing world leaders. My most obvious way of removing my anxiety is therefore to erase from my consciousness the knowledge that prompted my concern in the first place."

I have a strong commitment to knowing whatever is there to be known, so that this obvious choice of denying the information was not one that I could, with continuing self-respect, allow myself to take. I believe that we all have a vivid awareness of horror, and that we do mobilize our psychological defenses against it because horror teaches us the lesson of our own powerlessness. I prefer to forget our vulnerability to such things as monstrous animal attack, or perverse wickedness by someone deaf to our appeals, or gross betrayal by a loved one, until something brings these things to my reluctant atten­tion. Horror exposes us to despoliation and loss which we lack power to prevent, and potentially horrifying images and experiences are a part of our daily lives. When we stop to think about it, reality is replete with horror.

As a way of coping with horror, I find that I have created a men­tal chamber of horrors into which I place all such items. In this chamber are all the stories, actual and imagined, of murder, torture and brutality, of rape and assault and violence, with which our fic­tional and historical literature are full; of agonizing forms of dying, of all kinds of tragic loss, of betrayal of trust, of lying propaganda from the powerful, of the repression of people by means of unjust laws and degrading servitude - the list seems endless. This chamber of horrors connects in unconscious and forgotten ways with many past personal experiences of horror, as well as with minor experiences of everyday

 

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life that provide an imaginative basis with the more extreme horrors.

"End of the world" scenarios, of which nuclear holocaust is one variant, form a section of this chamber. In my youth, I saw a film called When Worlds Collide, in which everybody perishes when a wayward planet from outer space collides with planet Earth, except for a small group of Americans who escape in a just-then-invented spaceship and presumably colonize the undamaged side of the wayward planet. I had nightmares for a whole week thereafter, and I still remember the horror with which I came to a conscious recognition of the vulnerability, fragility and contingency of our world as a whole (as distinct from our individual deaths).

When I now encounter such horrors in conversation or imagina­tion, I have a feeling of coming up short before a dark mystery. I recognize that "it" is there, and that I have a deep reluctance to be aware of it. At this point, silence seems more appropriate than every­day speech, and this silence marks the threshold of the dreadful area. It is the silence of listening to the uncomfortable news that this world, which in my admittedly sheltered experience is full of pleasant things and expansive opportunities, is also full of horrors. I do not easily break this silence, and, at least so far as my conscious choices are con­cerned, do so only under the constraint of the needs of some specific moment. So War Game became a notable addition to this inner chamber of horrors, and I was then able to go on with daily life more or less as before.

I recognize other patterns of relationship with horror. I do not choose or commend the innocence that does not consciously know that horror exists; we need to face reality. Nor can I want the deep self-division that afflicts people tormented by real-life traumas; it may be true that there is profound peace and strength for those who manage to resolve such traumas, but I hardly feel in a position to point this out to those still in agony. As well as being victims, we are probably all agents of horror to some degree. I recognize my own capacity to inflict horror upon others, either in specific past actions or in my fantasy life, even while I am clear about the evil of acting out unacceptable and hor­rible fantasies.

There seem to be deep and apparently insoluble contradictions in my own attitudes to horror. I recognize the need for the protection of some against the depredations of others, which leads to an accep­tance of laws that seek to restrain horrible actions. Yet legal coercion may itself become a form of repressive horror. How can I oppose coer­cion while accepting the need for restraint, when it is clear that volun­tary restraint by all people is not to be expected? This general ambivalence occurs, for me, in relation to virtually all areas of the criminal law, to significant aspects of international relations and to many of the dilemmas of parenting. I feel a similar ambivalence con­cerning the censorship of images of horrific violence.

 

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Contradictions suggest to me the need for a new and more satisfactory point of view, the outlines of which remain elusive. Beyond laws, we need a caring community that can care for its members. I would like to think that .coercive laws are sufficiently justified to | activate the consciences of law-breakers, and are ad­ministered with such restraint that they provide a pressure towards goodness rather than a vehicle for vengeful retribution. Where therapeutic communication with law-breakers is possible, these benevolent dynamics may bear good fruit. Yet there remain the agonizing questions of justice for the victims, and of dealing with unrepentant criminals.

I am humanly perplexed and troubled by those who routinely administer horror, such as torturers, the guards at Auschwitz, or hit men for organized crime; I am also shocked by apparently responsible young men who suddenly grab a gun and become mass murderers of innocent strangers. Yet even if horror is beyond my conscious com­prehension, I believe in the underlying spiritual unity of humanity, and recognize the peril of pretending that I have connections only with the victims and with the authority figures. I see value in exploring our personal defense systems against too close a conscious contact with horror, as these reflect the rigidities and blind spots of our society. Without such exploration, it seems unlikely that we can create more effective ways of dealing with these deeply troubling realities. Inner and outer realities seem particularly closely linked in this area, and this exploration is an important part of our peace education agenda.

It is perilous to open up deeply traumatic areas of experience without awareness of what can be involved; yet vital aspects of ourselves are locked up in these areas. We cannot know reality without accepting horror, however reluctantly and circumspectly, into our awareness. Horror indicates a transcendent dimension at work, even if it is demonic and repugnant. We can face the horrors of life when we can draw on the equally transcendent resources of goodness, which are also aspects of the wider reality beyond our conscious awareness. From this perspective, horror can be seen as one of the ante-chambers of the sacred. I see value in learning to accept horror, in all its forms, into our awareness because reality includes horror. For this, we need teaching that is aware of the dynamics of revelation, in which previously unknown realities can announce themselves so that they come to be known.

What I think of as traditional teaching presents itself as purely factual in its focus. This produces the bizarre result that horror is not a recognized part of the curriculum, while many facts capable of striking horror into the hearts of sensitive students can be presented in an emo­tional monotone. A class in physics in which the teacher uses the word "nuclear" to describe aspects of sub-atomic particles may lead students to think of nuclear bombs, though these have not been mentioned. The "feeling-tone" in the class may become strange. This can be cleared by being made explicit and therefore conscious, allowing previously un-

 

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askable questions to be asked. When this is done, it would seem that students will, paradoxically, be better able to concentrate upon learn­ing about sub-atomic particles, and be free to open up questions of real personal concern to themselves (though perhaps not both at the same time). We need teaching that is both careful of factual accuracy and sensitive to appropriate emotional reactions.

It seems clear that people have already received the message that nuclear war is terribly destructive, and that it could somehow lead to the end of our world. In listening to the fears and anxieties of children, researchers such as Noel Wilson have been surprised by the pervasiveness of the fear of nuclear holocaust. Whatever the level of our willingness for a conscious awareness of nuclear war, we seem to have a full implicit awareness of it, and a desire for life. What we may lack is a sense of realistic hope that the nuclear threat can be nullified. Where such a hope does not exist, it is useless to pile up more detailed information, as this puts pressure on us to stop denying what we can­not face, and recognize our powerlessness and our despair. I need a sense of the availability of positive resources with which to offset my powerlessness if I am to feel able to cope with a full awareness of horror.

Peace activists sometimes suggest that all we need to do in order to mobilize the citizens of the world into an irresistible peace movement is to inform them sufficiently strongly about the horror of nuclear war, and that this could be achieved by getting everyone to see War Game. This seems to me to be quite wrong-headed and counter­productive. I accept that the political effect that the film had on me was to strengthen and sharpen my resolve to become more active in the peace movement, and that this may also be true for some others. For those who tend to trust authority rather than themselves, the like­ly response to perceived threat is to expect authority to deal with it. Where the benevolence or the capacity of authority is called into ques­tion, as it is in War Game, it seems that such reliance is still likely to happen, though with an additional burden of debilitating anxiety. Educational strategies that seek to use horror to produce activism are counter-productive because horror confirms the message of our own powerlessness, whereas activism requires the enhancement of our sense of power.

I offer the following ground rules for educational work involving things that we are likely to find horrible:

1.   Never introduce horrors gratuitously, but only as an integral part of whatever you are studying. This allows students to keep it safe­ly “out there” while still admitting it to their awareness.

2.   Establish a learning community of dialogue in which all are invited to share, and in which mutual respect can develop. Positive reassurances are unlikely to be heard if students feel alienated from the situation.

3.   Do not push students to think about horrors. Any mention of a

 

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horrible reality has already made this great more conscious, and further work on facing this challenge is more likely to be successful when it happens at the student’s own initiative.

4.   Offer opportunities for students to express their own knowledge of horrors. This knowledge will have been already lived through, and so will contain some resources for coping.

5.   Provide opportunities for students to create images that relate to coping with horror. We "digest "experience through images, and can mobilize our own powerful resources for coping in this way.

6.   Be ready to share your own experience of horror, and of how you cope. If you cannot do this, it is unrealistic to expect your students to share their experiences.

7.   Normalize states of not-knowing and of powerlessness. We need to learn how to accept our uncertainty and inadequacy, recognizing that there are things we can do to move beyond these states.

8.   Listen carefully to each student. You need to know when the anxie­ty levels are getting excessive for anyone, and to act to enhance rational self-control where this seems appropriate.

9.   Listen carefully to yourself. You will know intuitively about the most important aspects of the classroom experience that you are sharing with your students, and it is essential for effective teaching that you stay in touch with the depth and seriousness of the issues involved.

10.  Seek help from appropriate colleagues in designing, monitoring and evaluating your work. It is unlikely that we can carry the full burden of what we come to know of our students, ourselves and our world, without proper support.

These ground rules assume that horrors are a part of life, and so cannot properly be excluded from classrooms. Indeed, arbitrary attempts to do so create an atmosphere of increased potency for our fears. The same general guidelines apply to political controversy about educational programs that deal with horror. The controversy basically introduces further people (parents, politicians, community members) whose sensitivities require responses from us and who may be willing to join us in exploring peace issues.

Where we are working educationally with difficult and threatening situations, and with the associated difficult emotions, we need to create balance by contacting and expressing powerful positive images that help us to find the strength to face the threats and the fears. Educational work has traditionally stressed the rational and in­tellectual aspects of reality, and these remain important; yet the outstanding problems for peace-making lie in the area of entrenched attitudes and unconscious limitations that we place upon our own potentialities. It seems important that peace educators develop resources for working also with the irrational sources of conflict and of hope. One central focus for this is to work with images that connect with those elements of our experience that have shaped our attitudes and perceptions.