Elementary and High School Peace Education

For the past few years I’ve thought that the educational system should have required courses in communication skills, particularly nonviolent communication, from kindergarten through grade twelve. Such a course on nonviolence and compassion should be as central to every school’s curriculum as reading and math. While it is also important to teach this in college, it should be started at as young an age as possible, when children are the most impressionable and the least set in their ways. If we start teaching nonviolence and compassion early, then we are less likely to have to “unteach” violence, prejudice, and domination.

Incorporating nonviolent and compassionate communication skills into the elementary, junior high, and high school curriculum would be a method of using education for nonviolent revolution. Our society is slowly evolving, but it continues to be predominantly a Dominator Society, as Riane Eisler, author of The Chalice and the Blade, has called patriarchy, which has gone to such an insane extreme that nuclear weapons exists.

The obstruction I see in starting up nonviolent communication/peace education in public schools K-12 is that schools are funded by the patriarchal government that is responsible for the wars and has a war department euphemistically called the Department of “Defense.” Somehow I don’t see those responsible for the war-mongering and militaristic system as eager to support or approve of education that undermines their unjustified and oppressive authority. True, in K-12 the teaching could, at first, be subtler than in the universities: the main focus could be on nonviolent communication in interpersonal relations rather than on an international level. Since diplomacy between people who are face-to-face and diplomacy between countries is essentially the same thing, compassion and the absence of an “us and them” mentality, students wouldn’t have trouble developing an aversion for fascism, militarism, patriarchy, and dominance. The more obviously pacifist teachings would, at least at the beginning of the educational reform, be reserved for colleges and universities.

The government wouldn’t have to know that nonviolent communication courses are aimed at overthrowing war, militarism, and patriarchy in general. Education that improves interpersonal communication would influence business relations, making the workplace friendlier and cutting down on harassment. It would influence personal relationships, doing away with incest, rape, and domestic violence. Compassionate communication would reduce the lack of self-confidence, self-esteem, and happiness that young people with verbally abusive, let alone physically abusive, relatives experience at what I suspect is an epidemic level. Without a population in which abuse is epidemic, especially abuse of females, then collectively the population will be much happier and healthier, since it would be so much less likely to escape into harmful addictions (such as alcohol, drugs, irresponsible sex, and TV) and violence, and more likely to be hopeful and strive to make the world a better place.)

One option is for homeschoolers to teach nonviolent and compassionate communication. Another option is for teachers to spread the word about nonviolent and compassionate communication education via word of mouth and teach in an underground, unofficial setting rather than as part of the regular school curriculum. In other words, teachers could have their students meet up with them after regular school hours and not necessarily at the school. This could go on, perhaps for one generation, before ultimately the teaching of nonviolence and compassion for kindergarten through twelfth grade would be a regular part of the curriculum. I say after one generation because a nonviolent revolution takes time, and if one generation became accustomed to compassionate and nonviolent communication courses, then it would be more acceptable after that generation grows up. That generation would begin to help run the government and therefore affect the government.

Universities of Peace
I read Robert Thurman’s book Inner Revolution, in which he interprets traditional Tibetan culture as creating a culture of peace by encouraging monasticism over militarism (although even he admits that Tibet is no utopia, unlike Westerners who think it was perfectly nonviolence for a thousand years, in spite of the fact that it’s been just another patriarchal country all that time). Thurman talks of the Tibetan monasteries as institutions of peace on a grand scale, something we do not have in the United States. It would be wonderful indeed if we had universities of peace, indeed if the entire world had universities of peace, or at the very least universities that have a Peace Studies department that continues the nonviolent and compassionate communication education that I described previously. Unlike the typical elementary, junior high, and high school, private colleges wouldn’t have the obstruction of the government.

This university idea is related to my notion of nonviolent and compassionate education in kindergarten through twelfth grade. I have come up with the idea of having Universities of Peace spread all the way across the United States (actually, all over the world, but let’s start small). This would be similar to Tibetan monasteries, but secular rather than strictly Buddhist, since we’d want to have vast numbers enroll. Such schools would be more conscientious about creating a peaceful world. Perhaps it could start with existing universities developing Peace Departments. Ultimately it would be great for Universities of Peace to be the norm in education. The Center for Partnership Studies (http://www.partnershipway.org), founded by Riane Eisler, could be an inspiration and in some way a participant in these universities.

Benjamin, Medea. “A Life in the Movement: an Interview with Frida Berrigan” Medea Benjamin and Jodie Evans, eds. Stop the Next War Now: Effective Responses to Violence and Terrorism. Inner Ocean Publishing, Inc, San Francisco: 2005, pp. 60-6

Eisler, Riane. The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future. HarperSanFrancisco, 1995.

Thurman, Robert. Inner Revolution: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Real Happiness. Riverhead Books, NY: 1998.

Peacemaker Institute:   www.PeacemakerInstitute.org

Hubs for Peace:

http://hubpages.com/_worldpeace/request … ew&rss