Travel Theme: White

This week, Ailsa at Where’s My Backpack’ has reminded us all that Friday September 21st is the UN’s International Day of Peace, established in 1981. The first Peace Day was first celebrated in 1982. The theme for 2012 is ‘Sustainable Peace for a Sustainable Future’. From the UN web site:  There can be no sustainable future without a sustainable peace. Sustainable peace must be built on sustainable development.

For me, sustainable development is inextricably linked with education. This is our best chance of creating a better future. So what are we teaching our young people about power and conflict, equality and harmony? As an educator, one of my primary goals is to create and sustain a peaceful learning environment. In my experience, this is fostered through the development of supportive relationships within a safe and inclusive atmosphere where each individual feels that their contributions are valued equally. Many educators strive for an ‘orderly’ classroom, in which students abide by the ‘code of conduct’ and comply with the teacher in charge. I prefer to create a democratic classroom, in which students are encouraged and empowered to engage with me, with each other and with their learning in a collaborative manner, thereby organically creating the learning experience.

Increasingly I am aware that principals  administrators reject this ‘critical pedagogy’ in favour of a ‘guaranteed and viable curriculum’ that follows a mandated ‘teaching and learning model’ in order to achieve prescribed ‘standards’ arbitrarily set by the powers that be. No doubt they have good intentions, desiring to be competitive by world standards, but naively, they are aspiring to a very narrow definition of ‘success’. Within this restricting system, students have no choice but to become passive recipients of a stultified curriculum and teachers are compelled to ‘teach to the test’. Because, you see, the ‘test’ is supposedly the most salient measure of ‘success’. The revolutionary thinker and activist, Paulo Freire describes this as a ‘banking model’ of education, one in which teachers ‘deposit’ a set curriculum into passive minds in order to reproduce the characteristics of the ruling system. Students are not encouraged to question the status quo and critical thinking is subsumed under a pile of standardised tests. Thus, we create and recreate a society of mute automatons and our classrooms are rendered as ‘peaceful’ as a cemetery.

So what does my little rant have to do with the International Day of Peace? Well, just as we are compromising the future of our planet by ignoring warning signs that signal the importance of sustainability, we are compromising the future lives of our children by educating them in ways that silence their voices, discourage their individuality and diminish their personal power. Unlike the students who sat before me twenty years ago, the majority of young people today do not know how to think for themselves, because they feel they do not have permission to do so. They do not know how to embrace divergent thinking or support their opinions with credible evidence, because they are drowned in assertions and hyperbole. They desperately want to connect with nature, with each other and with people on the other side of the world, but they are limited by the xenophobic culture they have inherited and the strength of their wireless broadband connection. We need to provide young people with genuine opportunities for connection, and with positive models of how to live peacefully in harmony with our fellow creatures and with nature. Our politicians do not know how to engage in respectful debate, our leaders are more obsessed with degrading their opponents than developing progressive policies, and our mainstream media is controlled by a conservative agenda that discourages dissent.

United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon states “National budgets should focus on building human capacity, not deadly weapons”. And yet our government continues to under-resource public education. It is our responsibility, as adults to understand the neo-liberal agenda and challenge its manifestations. Moreover, as educators and mentors, it is our obligation to teach young people to embrace difference and appreciate the value of conflicting perspectives, while understanding the destructive outcomes of rigid dogma, vilification and violent conflict. This is a challenging task and one that must not be taken lightly.

I try to remain optimistic, clutching at every glimmer of hope that arises, seeking inspiration from those who are disrupting the power structures, fighting for egalitarian principles or leading with integrity. And yet I despair. I fear that we will never attain peace in the world if we do not first seek inner peace and come to understand how to nurture and use our personal power for the good of humanity. That, my friends is a topic for another day.

Have a peaceful, connected weekend!