Peace Education - Comparing Two Peace Ed Books

An educator is one of the most influential figures in a student's life, and even more so is the educator of peace. The peace educator can provide a peaceable classroom and allow for student's to develop inner convictions about the need for peace. When a group of young students understand and act on the need for peace, they become a strong positive force within their local school, community, society and world. The teacher who desires to pursue peace with their students are supported by a rich supply of Peace Education resources that provide the needed knowledge, theory, research and practical advice for the classroom. This paper will look at two resources from among them who stress similar things about the education of peace. This paper will summarise the books Peace Education by Ian Harris and Mary Lee Morrison and Waging War on Our Schools by Linda Lantieri and Janet Patti and expand them with practical implementation strategies to aid the education of peace in the classroom.

Harris and Morrison in Peace Education approach the discipline of Peace Education as both a philosophy as well as a process, and imply that the intangible concept of peace can only be made possible through the process of educational awareness. Thus, throughout the book the authors stress the significance of the teacher. The authors' definition of Peace Education consistently expands throughout the book as they integrate disciplines that look at issues of conflict resolution, the environment, international relations, development, and human rights into their understanding of Peace Education. Most predominantly, however, Harris and Morrison stress that Peace Education is empowering, and should be infused into teachers' pre-existing curriculum. The empowerment of Peace Education, the authors argue, is too often stifled by the traditional hierarchical structure of the school and classroom that actually supports structural violence. If the teacher does not support individuality and allow for opportunity within the classroom for students to develop their own critical thinking, the students feel not only powerless within the classroom but also powerless to face the problems outside of it.

Harris and Morrison argue the need for increased awareness amongst students that they are capable of conflict resolution. They look at conflict resolution solutions on both global and local scale and argue that the latter must be developed first. The authors argue that a sense of inner peace is required before it expands outwards into their surroundings. The role of the teacher then is stressed throughout the book: the educator must provide opportunity in their classroom to develop and foster inner and then outer peace. The approach the book takes to peace is one of peace-building, separating it from peace keeping and peace making. The authors favour the proactive approach of peace building and provide research that strongly supports it.

Peace Education also provides research into the area of assumption of humanity's aggressiveness and the origin of violence. The theories Harris and Morrison present include a specifically Ð''Peace Education' approach which determines that human beings are capable of behaviour change and are not inherently violent. The book supports this approach with research and encourages educators to adopt it to heighten their expectations of their students. In contrast to the belief that human beings are inherently violent, the authors argue that through the similarities of religious interpretations of peace and utopian ideals that the desire for peace is stronger than the presence of violence.

Linda Lantieri and Janet Patti's Waging Peace in our Schools springs from Lantieri's experience in her co-found Resolving Conflict Creatively Program (RCCP) and focuses on ways to abolish indifference, reconstruct safe and peaceable schools, and teach ways in which to handle conflict creatively. Full of successful case studies from the RCC Program, the book aims to make peace possible and relevant on a local level. Banking on research into the fields of psychology and Neuroscience, Lantieri and Patti resolve that people's most influencing asset is their Emotional Intelligence, or EQ, in which they argue as being able to be strengthened and developed. The authors claim that the time in which developing EQ is most effective is during a youth's schooling years and that it is largely the responsibility of the educator to offer the correct conditions for its development. The authors state that strengthening the emotional brain alongside the thinking brain requires a stable, peaceable classroom in which to develop.

The book works within William Krielder's Ð''six principles of the peaceable classroom', outlining the needs as being cooperation, caring communication, the appreciation of diversity, the appropriate expression of feelings, responsible decision making, and conflict resolution. All these strategies are constantly stressed throughout the book. If these are implemented, the authors argue that resolving conflict will naturally flow within the classroom. The authors also isolate the issue of consistency between the home and school and highlight the need of teachers and parents to connect as partners with common goals of peace and common practices of non-violent discipine. Within conflict resolution itself the authors outline what skills have worked well within RCCP. The authors focus on the need for educators to train themselves first, to carefully consider the language they use and make sure that it is community-affirming and non-competitive, to be active listeners and to use praise and encouragement.

A large focus of the book is the role of the teacher as a facilitator and not that of the authoritarian. The book explains that for teachers to foster a peaceable community, they must learn to let go of the power traditionally assigned to the role of the teacher and learn to assist the students own discoveries. The teacher, they argue, should initiate and guide discussions only and not control them. The book calls for a shift of power to teachers sharing power with the students. By sharing power, the teacher must then move away from the role as the judge and jury of school and classroom conflicts and encourage peer mediation. Peer mediation also plays a large part in how the book tackles the topic of racial prejudice. The authors recognise it as one of the major issues that fuel the fire of violence in America. The authors present prevention strategies as being peer mediation and creating a school and classroom culture of appreciation of diversity. Waging Peace on Our Schools offers many successful case studies of this kind that aim to inspire hope in a school's culture being able to be changed. The book argues that peer mediation cannot effectively stand on its own without