Overview: Toward a Better World for Our Grandchildren

The growing destructive capacities of humanity make this the prime problem of the twenty-first century. How we cope with this problem will have a profound bearing on the world of our grandchildren. The twentieth century was the bloodiest ever. World War II caused at least 50 million deaths. Six million died in the Holocaust. At Hiroshima, one bomb caused 100,000 deaths. Now thousands of such bombs (smaller and more conveniently transportable tactical bombs) are housed in Russia. Many are poorly guarded, susceptible to theft and bribery. Others may be made elsewhere. Danger increases with the number of such weapons existing in the world.Why? There is a greater chance of error, theft, and bribery—and ultimately their use in war or terrorism. Therefore, we should diminish the numbers as much as we can and secure responsible stewardship for those that remain. Moreover, there are still thousands of nuclear weapons that are far more powerful than the smaller tactical weapons. Biological and chemical weapons are easier to make than nuclear warheads and therefore have special appeal to terrorists. Small arms and light weapons now cover the world wall-to-wall. They include highly lethal machine guns, mortars, automatic rifles, and rocket launchers. Altogether, the destructive capacity of humanity is almost beyond imagination. Moreover, there is an exciting effect of today’s vast weapons on political demagogues, religious fanatics, and ethnic haters—and plenty of them exist in the world. Incitement to hatred and violence can occur with radio, TV, the Internet, and many other media. Thus, we can more powerfully incite violence, utilize more lethal weapons, and do much more damage than ever imaginable before. No group is so small or so far away as to prevent it from doing immense damage anywhere. The time has come to move beyond complacency, fatalism, denial, and avoidance. We must urgently seek to understand and strengthen an array of institutions and organizations that have the capacity to use tools and strategies to prevent deadly conflict. The first author (D.A.H.) considered many such possibilities in his recent book, No More Killing Fields: Preventing Deadly Conflict. Overall, this gives humanity a greater range of possibilities than ever before for building a system for preventing war and genocide. It will not be easy.

Child Development, the Human Group, and Survival

In the past several decades, the study of the behavior of nonhuman primates—monkeys and apes—has made rapid progress. We can learn from the dimly perceived past when our ancestors confronted the problems of survival without the sophisticated technological aids so inextricably linked to human adaptation in recent times. Our past is inaccessible to direct study. But by careful observation of our closest living relatives, monkeys and apes, we can begin to understand the nonhuman primate heritage from which our ancient ancestors took a long route over millions of years toward humanity. Nonhuman primates live in groups that are held together by strong and enduring bonds between individuals. These bonds may be reflected in a variety of ways: relationships between adult males and females, between adults of the same sex, between juveniles, and between adult males or females and their young. Altogether, in their natural habitats they have a rich social life. Compared with most other mammals, primates have fewer young at a time. Rather than litters, all Old World monkeys and apes have only one offspring at a time, and they give each one a great deal of attention. The young have longer periods of immaturity than other mammals, including prolonged nutritional dependence on the mother. A corollary of the prolonged physical immaturity and nutritional dependence of the primate infant is a longer and more intense mother- infant relationship and a longer period of tutelage and learning the customs and survival skills of the group. In all higher primates except humans, infants cling reflexively to their mothers from birth, and mother-infant contact is maintained virtually all of the time until the much older infant develops the ability to keep up with the mother on its own. Nursing occurs in many short bouts around the clock; in early infancy, it is initiated and terminated by the infant, an easy process, because the infant is always clinging to the mother’s body, anyway. This combination of clinging, carrying, continuous contact, and frequent nursing is characteristic of all higher nonhuman primates.

International Education: A Global Outlook

The world is rapidly moving toward greater interdependency and globalization, driven by technological advances, economic opportunities, and intellectual curiosity. There is more movement across national boundaries than ever before: of people, money, information, ideas, images, and much more. We are embedded among billions of people, mostly strangers, yet we need them and they need us: to make a living; to travel; to cope with widespread problems like infectious diseases and terrorism; to secure the safety of our food, water, and environment; and to protect us physically. So now we humans in virtually every country must of necessity find decent ways to interact with strangers, move beyond stereotypes, and to the extent possible turn strangers into familiar people, even turn potential adversaries into friends. Yet this is a task that goes far beyond the prior experience of humanity. Yes, we have done some of this before, but much less than we will have to do as a practical matter in the twenty first century. In our ancient past, this would have been exceedingly difficult. Among monkeys and apes, a very powerful instigator for harmful aggression is the crowding of strangers in the presence of valued resources. Probably the same was true for our early human ancestors over many millennia. Now we have to learn how to transcend ancient suspicions and biases, learn how to live together with people who are initially strange and perhaps implicitly threatening. To do so, we must widen the horizons of education from childhood onward and learn—in a reasonable sampling process—about other peoples, cultures, ideas, preferences, ways of life. In this process, strangeness can be converted to familiarity, suspicion to fascination. That is why international education bears not only on economic well-being in a world of technoeconomic globalization, but it also bears on the vital issues of war and peace. Americans have typically focused their attention on domestic concerns rather than looking abroad. But this mindset is no longer viable. As the world community continues to become evermore interconnected, U.S. citizens will need to look beyond their shores with an attitude of curiosity and open-mindedness. The same need exists in many nations throughout the world. And this extends to our children.

Media as an Educational System: Can the Media Help?

The media, even in democratic societies, have been faulted for glorifying violence, especially in the entertainment industry. And we have seen how the harsh use of hateful propaganda through the media, by nationalist and sectarian leaders, can inflame conflicts in many parts of the world. The international community can support media that portray accurate information on current events, show constructive relations between different groups, and report instances in which violence has been prevented. Foundations, commissions, and universities can work with broadcasters to help provide responsible, insightful coverage of serious conflicts. For example, through constructive interactions with the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict, CNN International moved to balance coverage of violence and strategies for peaceful conflict resolution. Social action for prosocial media may become an effective function of nongovernmental organizations, similar to their achievements in human rights. Research findings have established a causal link between children’s television viewing and their subsequent behavior in the United States and a variety of other countries (e.g., Australia, Finland, Israel, the Netherlands, Poland). Both aggressive and prosocial behaviors can be evoked, depending on the content of programs. There is no reason to assume that the impact of movies is substantially different. As early as age 2, children imitate behaviors (including violent behaviors) seen on television, and the effects may last into their teen years. Must violent content predominate forever? How can the media help to prevent deadly conflicts in the future? The proliferation of media in all forms constitutes an important aspect of globalization. Films, television, print, radio, and the Internet have immense power to reach people with powerful messages, for better and worse. At present, the United States is largely responsible for the output of film and television content seen by people worldwide. But advances in technology are making it increasingly feasible for media to be produced in all parts of the world—all too often with messages of hate, and they may become even more dangerous than the excessive violence in U.S. television and movies. Films have great, unused potential for encouraging peace and for nonviolent problem solving. They entertain, educate, and constitute a widely shared experience.

Community Service: Preparation for Socially Responsible Adulthood

There is a growing trend in education that has considerable potential for fostering constructive, unselfish behavior during adolescence: community service. Supervised community service, when started in early adolescence, can play a critical role in the shaping of responsible, caring, altruistic behavior. Service programs can be organized effectively by schools, by community organizations, and by religious institutions. How we help others is crucial. We must not convey superiority over others. We must impart a sense of the mutuality of being full members of the community and sharing a common fate as human beings in a world that sometimes is insensitive and at times even cruel. In 1989, a Carnegie report on the middle grades, Turning Points, stated an important insight. Early adolescence offers a superb developmental opportunity to learn values, skills, and a sense of social responsibility important for citizenship in democracies. Every middle grade school should include youth service—supervised activity helping others in the community, ideally, in collaboration with schools—in their core instructional programs for the middle grades. Turning Points 2000, a follow-up book to the 1989 landmark report, Turning Points, provides an in-depth examination of how to improve education for the middle grades and gives practical guidance to practitioners wishing to implement the Turning Points model. The research base has grown over the past 10 years, and this chapter reflects the findings of the research. It also bridges the gap between research and practice by presenting theory in practical and understandable terms. Specific to our theme of service learning, Turning Points 2000 provides a sound argument for integrating the community into the curriculum. Mutual respect and understanding, a sense of belonging, and pride in making valued contributions to others are the essence of school and community collaboration. The Early Adolescent Helper Program (EAHP), a pioneering project initiated by the City University of New York in 1982 and led by Joan Schine, brings school personnel, community-agency staff, and the middle grade school Helpers together. An effort was clearly made to integrate the school curricula with youth in community service programs. Between 1982 and 1989, almost 700 students in 17 New York City middle and junior high schools were involved in the Early Adolescent Helper Program.

Contact, Intergroup Relations, and Opportunities for Education

If groups are strange to each other and therefore fearful or hostile, why not bring them together so they can get to know each other and become friendly? This plausible approach is more complicated than it looks at first glance. Under what conditions will intergroup contact be helpful? Can it sometimes be harmful? A variety of field and laboratory experiments support the hypothesis that intergroup competition tends to strengthen social relations within each group and to disrupt relations between the groups. If the experiments are arranged in a way that deliberately fosters competition between the groups, these effects are heightened. But even in the absence of such direct instruction or arrangement, potent factors favor interpersonal attraction or mutual attachment within a group: frequency of social interaction, proximity to each other, familiarity, and similarity of attitudes and values. Almost any sort of interaction within a group tends to promote in-group favoritism. Actually, it seems rather difficult to avoid this effect even if one tries to do so. Humans are highly susceptible to invidious in-group/out-group distinctions. Extensive experimental work strongly confirms the rich variety of observations from fieldwork in many cultures over extended times and in a variety of societies. This does indeed seem to be a profound and pervasive human characteristic—one of great practical significance throughout history. We will return to this theme and examples throughout the book. Findings of this sort have led some psychologists to formulate a principle of social identity, which emphasizes the powerful effects of social categorization in its own right. Such categorization seems to highlight an important aspect of the individual self-concept (and self-esteem) based on group membership. Such membership has, from the evolutionary and historical record, been an important feature in human survival over the millennia. In contemporary people—at least, in those who participate in psychological experiments—the cognitive delineation into an in-group and out-group, even without invidious attributions, tends to set in motion a process by which there is an accentuation of similarities within groups and differences between groups. It seems very convenient, easy, and somehow natural for people to deal with these via simple schemas or stereotypes.

Teaching Hatred

We turn now to egregious examples of ways that education can be used to instill hatred, with the help of authoritarian states and fanatical leaders (either theological or secular) who shape children’s lives. There have been vivid examples of this throughout the twentieth century. The twenty-first century starts with the dramatic case of some Islamic fundamentalist schools that follow in this tradition of molding the lives of children for careers of hatred and violence.We describe these examples to provide a sharp contrast to the remainder of this book. Our fundamental aspiration is to inspire educators and leaders to embrace the important alternative role of education in fostering prosocial, empathic, and cooperative behavior—with insight into the destructive forces of human experience—that can provide the basis for a peaceful world in the long run. To be effective, we must address the obstacles to education in constructing such programs. Children can be brought up to hate, to condone killing, and even to participate in killing. That experiment has been done repeatedly. In the rest of this book, let us look briefly at examples of this destructive educational experience and then at the other side of the coin—learning to live together peacefully. The human capacity to shape child and adolescent development toward a pervasive culture of hatred and violence was vividly demonstrated by the Nazi experience. The his- torian Klaus Fischer writes on youth and education, and women and the family, in his book Nazi Germany—A New History. We begin with the origin of youth groups as a countercultural protest and move to the creation of the Hitler Youth movement and ways in which it exploited these relatively innocent youthful protests. Nazi education, its philosophy, and the creation of elite schools are described in terms of their attempt to shape the minds and bodies of boys toward devotion to the Führer and toward their future as Nazi leaders. Teachers, as well, were indoctrinated and obligated to behave in a prescribed manner toward the same end. The family, particularly the woman’s role in it, was seen as the social underpinning of society. The Nazi glorification of motherhood and the family was a means of creating more children to serve Hitler and the Nazi regime.

Ethnic, Religious, and Nationalist Factors in Human Conflict

Contemporary education must try hard to understand where we as a species came from and how our ancient heritage and recent historical transformation contribute to our current tendencies toward hatred and violence. If we are to overcome or control these destructive tendencies, we must grasp the powerful currents that make the task at once difficult and essential. Development of our ancestors took place in the context of small, face-to-face groups that provided the security of familiarity, support in times of stress, shared coping strategies, and enduring attachments that sustained hope and adaptation for a lifetime. Reciprocity was crucial in relationships, both within and between groups. Disapproval in the form of reduced sharing, social isolation, and the threat of rejection from one’s group were powerful sanctions that reinforced conformity to group norms. Indeed, the importance of sharing within the primary group was strongly conveyed to children from infancy onward. These basic facts of small-scale, traditional life have been enduring and powerful from earliest mankind to the present day. They apply to the hunting and gathering societies in which our ancient ancestors spent several million years, to the extended families of agricultural village societies, and to the primary groups of the homogeneous neighborhoods in preindustrial towns of the past that foreshadowed modern industrial and postindustrial societies. Our ancient ancestors’ world began to change drastically with the onset of agriculture 10,000 years ago. The existing evidence clearly shows that—once humans developed agriculture, settled in larger population groups, accumulated goods, and came to rely on designated areas for growing food and grazing animals—a widespread intergroup hostility became common, and at times, severe. Patterns of intergroup violence in preindustrial societies have been confirmed and described in detail by anthropologists and historians. Whatever the evolutionary background and its biological legacy, the historical record clarifies that aggressive behavior between individuals and between groups has been a prominent feature of human experience for at least several thousand years. Everywhere in the world, aggression toward others has been facilitated by a pervasive human tendency toward harsh dichotomizing between the positively valued we and the negatively valued they. Such behavior has been easily learned, practiced in childhood play, encouraged by custom, and rewarded by most human societies.

Education for Peace: The Role of Universities

This chapter emphasizes the potential leadership functions of universities in this field. They can (1) heighten awareness of the gravity of the problem, especially by international cooperation in sharing data; (2) conduct research with emphasis on interdisciplinary collaboration that gives deeper understanding of causes, nature and scope, amelioration, and prevention of mass violence; (3) upgrade education for peace in the universities and also extend the reach to educate the general public and leaders, including political, religious, ethnic, and military leaders—all of whom have massive responsibility for preventing catastrophes rather than inducing them; and (4) program excellent developmentally-appropriate educational materials for elementary and secondary schools, working in conjunction with teachers at each level. In March 2001, an international group of experts from various fields met to discuss the current status of education for peace and ways to improve it. Scholars from academia, prominent UN officials, and experts from nongovernmental, governmental, and multilateral organizations considered ways in which the University for Peace (UPEACE) might be able to strengthen the field of peace education.More broadly, participants analyzed the current state of peace education internationally. All concurred that the concerns posed by human conflict in the twenty-first century must be more adequately addressed. This initial section outlines important issues raised at the conference as well as its recommendations. In opening this meeting at the United Nations, Kofi Annan, UN Secretary General, made these remarks:… Knowledge, research, and teaching are vital in our new global environment. To achieve effective education for peace, we need to reach out to as many actors as possible to devise new approaches to challenges that are in themselves only beginning to be fully understood. . . . How do we promote the good governance needed to underpin stable and transparent societies? How do we make the unprecedented opportunities offered by science and technology work as a tool for peace? . . . Achieving decent, just, and peaceful relations among diverse human groups is an enterprise that must be constantly renewed—and education for peace is a fundamental part of that enterprise. Yet the world’s record on education for peace has been weak indeed. . . . To address complex causes, we need complex, interdisciplinary solutions.

Putting Education for Peace into Practice

Now let us turn our attention toward the practice of education for peace from several perspectives. We will examine some developmentally appropriate approaches to children and youth in understanding issues of war and peace, practical applications of teaching the prevention of deadly conflict and conflict resolution in schools, international relationships in education for peace, and other institutions with strong potential to promote peace education and conflict resolution. Even first-grade children can distinguish between societal conventions, noncontroversial questions, and controversial issues. Also, they expect their teachers to teach these types of knowledge differently. They are able to recognize that others may hold opposing viewpoints different from their own. With increasing age, elementary school children in democratic societies expect teachers to present different viewpoints on questions about which there is little societal consensus. And teachers are expected to present different viewpoints in addition to the one that students favor. Adolescence is the period when students markedly increase their ability to generalize the perspective of society, which is most important when discussing issues related to war, peace, and conflict. It is also a time when young people are most interested in issues related to fairness, justice, and equality. In the 1960s, Joseph Adelson, conducted a series of classic studies involving young people aged 11 to 18 from the United States, Great Britain, and West Germany. Interviews were conducted about concepts of law, community, individual rights, and the public good. It was found that at the age of 14, a shift in quality of thought occurred. They could see the possibility of conflict between individual rights and public good; they could connect specific examples of rights with abstract principles; they could consider long-term consequences of specific actions on individuals and communities. Similar findings were noted in subsequent research, leading to the belief that the period of adolescence is appropriate for developing critical thinking skills.