War, Education and Peace By Fernando Reimers

Transcription

1 War, Education and Peace By Fernando Reimers Only a few weeks ago President Bush announced that the United States would return to UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, after an 18-year absence. While this is a wise decision, it will only make a difference to global peace and security if the organization can rekindle its original mission: to focus attention on what is taught in schools throughout the world. This will require significant internal dialogue on the organization s commitment to this moral purpose, greater participation of American educators and more vigorous intellectual collaboration between UNESCO and universities in the U.S. UNESCO s early goals grew out of the devastation and pain of World War II when a group of nations had the good judgment to articulate one of the most remarkable ideas of our times: that each and every person on the planet had certain basic, inalienable rights, including the right to be educated. The United Nations created UNESCO to facilitate the achievement of this right. As a result of these ideas and UNESCO s leadership in implementing them, the world experienced the most dramatic rise in access to education in recent history. The number of children enrolled in school worldwide, from kindergarten through college, skyrocketed. In million children attended elementary school; by 1997 that number was 668 million. At the secondary level enrollments increased from 40 million to 398 million, and at college level the growth is even more staggering: enrollments jumped from 6.5 million to 88.2 million during the same period. We are just beginning to understand the implications of this transformation. That today many children around the world have exceeded the education levels of their parents is a testament to the success of that vision. On the other hand, that parental education continues to be one of the most important predictors of educational attainment and achievement throughout the world is a reminder of how much we still have to accomplish to ensure equal educational opportunities. 1

2 But UNESCO s early vision was not just about promoting education for all, it was a political vision that dealt squarely with the purposes of schooling. Fresh memories of the Holocaust and the realization that the Nazis had used schools for political indoctrination made it easy to see why this growing number of school children needed to learn in an environment that fostered peace and international understanding. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights reflects a moral clarity about the necessary commitment to solidarity and peace that was absent in successive declarative and operational activities of UNESCO or the UN family. The authors of this declaration considered this moral component of education as part of the basic right of education, and included it in the document: It shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace. Out of the rubble of World War II the urgency to expand access to education was perceived as the same thing as focusing on the moral purposes of schooling for all children of the human race. Despite decades of workshops, conferences, and meetings that have addressed this moral issue, the outcomes are clearly insufficient as measured by today s challenges to peace and global stability. In 1946, UNESCO first invited member states to review history and civics textbooks to ensure that they indeed fostered international tolerance and understanding. The organization continues to sponsor seminars on whether textbooks foster international understanding. Unfortunately these conferences have not been sufficiently effective, as evidenced by the fact that there are still government-sanctioned textbooks in use that teach students to hate people of other cultures. To this day some history textbooks distort accounts of crimes against humanity. These are powerful reminders of how much work remains before UNESCO achieves its mission, as stated in the first line of its constitution: That since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defenses of peace must be constructed. The assassins that smashed airplanes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, killing thousands of people from all over the world not engaged in combat had received many educational opportunities. By global standards they were highly schooled. Where did their education fail them? What did their textbooks fail to teach them? The seeds to 2

3 the genocide in Kosovo were planted and cultivated in the images presented in textbooks and classrooms for decades. It was only after thousands of innocent citizens were murdered that the international community finally acted by producing books that discussed peace and tolerance. Much work remains to be done to align the textbooks in the Palestinian Authority with a longterm commitment to peaceful coexistence with Israel. History textbooks in Japan do not mention the government s atrocities of war against the people of Korea, depriving students of the opportunity to develop a moral awareness that will make such violence less likely. And only three years ago textbooks on civic and military instruction produced in Venezuela with government approval presented Venezuelan adolescents with negative stereotypes of immigrants and blamed them for the country s ills, planting the seeds of hatred and creating the conditions for future political violence. Over the last 20 years many nations have seen their schools give up their moral purposes. Under attack by politicians and activists who believe the principal function of schools is to produce workers who can compete in the world economy, rather than citizens and people of good judgment committed to universal human values, school budgets have declined and their curricula have been diluted. The past two decades of failed reforms have left us with children and young adults who cannot read with understanding and, worse yet, are morally illiterate. It should not surprise us that we begin the 21st Century with global instability and with a peace that is fragile and uncertain. If we want schools to teach peace, we need comprehensive approaches that support the reduction of poverty and social exclusion. In expanding educational opportunities to include the most overlooked groups, we also need to focus on how policies are defined and implemented, by holding policy makers accountable to children and their parents, particularly to the most impoverished and overlooked groups. We need to focus on attracting the most imaginative, talented and hard working people of each generation into the classroom. Finally, we need to focus especially on classroom management practices, in the curriculum, and in how the social composition of classrooms and children s experiences in school enables them to develop an appreciation for diversity and the ability to trust and engage in collective action with others, especially those whose cultural background differs from their own. To teach peace and 3

4 understanding is to attend not just to the images and contents presented in textbooks, but to the very way education systems are organized and managed, to how students of different backgrounds are integrated (or not), in schools, and to how students and teachers spend their time together. The United States return to UNESCO is an important step in the long journey of constructing lasting peace and security. This must be followed by increasing significantly the numbers of highly skilled American educators working in and collaborating with the organization. Today only 23 people out of a staff of 2,000 are American. UNESCO also needs to intensify its relationship with American universities that do the best work on how children should be taught to understand, appreciate, and collaborate with people from other cultures, and who can help to update ideas about how to teach for peace from a sole emphasis on textbook content to more comprehensive and effective approaches. It should enable American educators to learn from what goes on in schools around the world, from how children are taught, and from what they are taught. Finally, UNESCO should use current telecommunication technologies to facilitate exchanges between teachers and students throughout the world all the while knowing that this will be resisted by governments who fear the freedom of their people to think for themselves and act independently. As a supranational organization it cannot depend exclusively on the will of national states to implement international covenants and treaties, particularly its mandate to promote universal human rights and the promotion of international understanding and peace. This new era of educational dialogue will enable the full integration of American educators into the world community. This will achieve two goals. It will demonstrate to a large number of teachers throughout the world that Americans truly believe that all persons are created equal and are ready to join in the struggles of those who labor to make societies open and just for all. More importantly it will contribute intellectual resources to UNESCO s yet unachieved goal: to build the defenses of peace in the minds of people making sure that our children indeed all children learn to understand our interdependence. 4

5 At the beginning of the 21st Century we are living in treacherous times that call for moral clarity. The means of destruction available to nations, groups and individuals today have grown in horrific ways, but they are not greater than our means to mobilize the people of good will in making the peaceful coexistence of all people in the earth a reality. It is high time to push aside the corrosive effects of cynicism, moral relativism and of corrupt authoritarianism and to go forth in a renewal of the purposes of schools, so that they empower all people to be free, to have equal options in life and to be able to live in peace with others. Fernando Reimers is an associate professor of international education policy at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. 5