I'll be presenting on critical peace education
next week at the CIES 2012 conference,
arguing that critical peace education (CPE) is vital to our efforts to achieve
larger scale conflict transformation. One particular skill, collaborative
problem solving, is not often described within the context of classic critical
theory (Habermas 1989, Foucault 1995). Here is a key contribution of critical
peace education to the project of global conflict transformation.
However, CPE results in not just
local capacity-building, in the sense of collaborative problem solving,
critical thinking, or the sort of critical analysis political and economic
elites abhor. When at its best, it can inspire a new sense of dignity, which is
a basic human need (Burton 1990; Duckworth 2011). I am defining dignity here as
a sense of self-worth, as well as a sense of one’s ability to contribute to
one’s community in a positive manner. Also inherent in dignity, I believe, is a
sense, both individual and social, of some sort of say in one’s future.
Perhaps such critical dialogues take the form of dialogues on alcoholism,
labor, and the military junta, as in Freire’s foundational Pedagogy of the
Oppressed (2003). Perhaps it takes the form of one group of young
nonviolent revolutionaries from Belgrade teaching younger revolutionaries in
Cairo how they overthrew a tyrant (Rosenberg 2011). Maybe communities in
Colombia empower themselves by mapping the resources of their own local
community (Bastidas and Gonzales 2008). Detained juveniles have used
writing and blogging to reflect on their communities, families, schooling, and
choices (Duckworth 2011).
Beyond engaging students in critical dialogues
about their worlds and what must most urgently be transformed, critical peace
education classrooms at their best immerse students in practical, localized,
and multi-disciplinary projects through which students can simultaneously
develop essential skills such as critical analysis, community-building, and
collaborative problem solving (Bajaj 2008; Duckworth 2006, 2011; Salomon 2002;
Salomon 2004; Salomon 2007; Ndura-Ouédraogo and Amster 2009). They design and
implement programs which positively transform their communities and so
experience themselves as powerful agents who can indeed impact society. Given
that a sense of powerlessness is often part of the identity of those oppressed
or marginalized, the importance of beginning to challenge that narrative by
helping students experience themselves as effective agents cannot be underestimated.
Students participating in CPE programs in public
school classrooms or any other community venue should emerge, in my view, with
a clear understanding of the processes of oppression and totalitarianism in
general; they are hardly relics of the 20th century. Cultural
manipulation through excess consumerism, atomized individualism, encouraging
xenophobia, stoking fear of foreign enemies, policies which discourage
education, and other such strategies should be “called out” as seeds of
authoritarian oppression. Authoritarianism is at least as much of a
mindset as it is a form of government. This makes us as citizens the last real
defense against authoritarianism.
*The above is adapted from my forthcoming chapter
in my edited volume Conflict Resolution and the Scholarship of Engagement.
