Shaping Education for Peace: NORRAG’s Contribution to the Framing of the Human Rights Council-Mandated Report

NORRAG contribution to developing guidance for the framing of the Human Rights Council-mandated report on ensuring quality education for peace and tolerance for every child (res. 54/5).

Education for peace is not just for crises and conflict situations. It is not just for learners. Education for peace for whom? We need to think about the teachers, the administrators, the managers, and all of these people who—in addition to the learners they serve—need support to build peace in their minds. What needs to be in initial training and in-service education for teachers, managers and administrators everywhere for education for peace?

We find increasing polarization everywhere: this is being perpetrated through things that education systems do not have control over. But we still need to work out what education systems need to do in order to support those who are working with learners who are affected by that. And then, in terms of teaching materials: Who are the textbook producers and how do they work? In the US, different pages may be provided inside the same textbooks because that’s what’s demanded of them, which can be some extremely divisive content. For example, a pros and cons worksheet on slavery in the USA, or post-conflict narratives in Rwanda.

Gender-based violence is still prevalent. It doesn’t have to be people standing across from each other with guns to be violence. What are the gender representations in teaching materials, in school and Ministry of Education hiring and promotion policies and practices? We know that they are not what they could be.

On the curriculum side of things, working with other actors in the educational space to say that foundational learning is not just literacy and numeracy and socio-emotional learning, but also includes peace. You can take a Freirean approach to “read the world as well as read the word”. This requires pedagogy that moves away from instruction alone; moving away from the idea that a teacher reading off a tablet with a script on it is pedagogy. It’s not.

And then in terms of endogenising education systems, we are talking about symbolic as well as very real violence against a series of different learners and our planet, so how do we actually think about decolonising development and knowledge for education? This is not about blaming our past for our unsatisfactory presents and letting ourselves and our leaders off the hook. Quite the contrary. How do we actually recognise the coloniality that affects us now. This is not just about a territorial decolonization process that happened in my country, Zimbabwe, in 1979-1980. But how coloniality affects us now. And that’s also in the US, in the UK, in France, in Switzerland. So you’re actually thinking differently—and globally—about privilege.

But we need to be very careful because people who don’t feel that they are privileged have been told “you are privileged”. They may be privileged in global
terms, but not in terms of their own countries, or maybe just in their own minds—with the competitive world we exist in always pushing them to want more and more and more. How do we bring those people in?

How do we help decolonise all minds to bring peace into them.

All educational institutions—indeed all organizations that involve people—have a hidden curriculum, whatever we do deliberately, it is there. So it’s important to be able to put that on the table and just say, “can we just think about what we are doing through all of these things for all of these people”. Do we have a conflictual or competitive feel to our workplace, or do we coexist in peace?

We need to highlight youth as leaders themselves who are empowering others, in addition to some others who need to be empowered to take and make change. We need to hold that tricky space: we do need to empower some youth, and we also need to recognize those who are already empowered and empowering others.

In conflict and crisis situations, teachers, administrators and managers may be ex-combatants themselves, they may have fled from the same situation as their
learners, so it is important to make sure that they also are on the receiving end of education for peace, in order for them to be able to then pass that along and support their learners in the same way that we’re expecting them to. It is also absolutely critical to move beyond the INEE Minimum Standards in emergency contexts. Minimum standards are fantastic as minimum standards. What about if we are talking about protracted crises? How can we support teachers who are more and more experienced through in-service training, contractual improvements and listening to their needs?

Let’s take seriously evidence of what works only if it’s contextually relevant, localized and we are supporting researchers in those places to do the work, to do the research. And remember that #theSouthAlsoKnows.