Comprehensive Peace Education: Educating for Global Responsibility

By Betty Reardon

Betty A. Reardon's groundbreaking work, originally authored in 1988, provides one of the first and clearest articulations of the field of peace education in theory and practice. Through reflection on her own experiences, Reardon assesses the state of peace education and offers a new comprehensive approach. She addresses the need to help educator

• Language: English
• Publisher: Peace Knowledge Press
• Release date: Sep 21, 2021
• ISBN: 9781732962231

Betty Reardon

Betty A. Reardon is acknowledged around the world as one of the founders of the field of peace education. She has been extensively involved in the international peace education movement and has been published widely in the field. She is a co-founder of both the International Institute on Peace Education and the Global Campaign for Peace Education.

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Acknowledgements

While any mistakes or misinterpretations are mine alone, this book is the product of learning with and from colleagues and students who share a commitment to making education an instrument of peace. I hope that from among them will come arguments with and additions to these assessments and reflections. To all I extend my thanks for their commitment and their contributions.

I want, too, to convey appreciation for their work on this volume and the companion curriculum collection to Peter Sieger, who carried out the editorial process with care and creativity, and to Gabriella Oldham, who processed the words with a watchful and precise eye and with considerable patience. 

Thanks also to Linda Farces, State University of New York at Binghamton, and Mac Freeman, Queens University, Canada, whose lecture invitations provided me with opportunities to first articulate my thoughts on the context and purpose of comprehensive peace education.

Foreword by Andria Wisler

In hindsight, I recognize that reading Comprehensive Peace Education by Betty Reardon for the first time two decades ago in the early 2000s was simultaneously an act of resistance and a practice of self care. In summer 2001, just a few months before my beloved cosmopolitan view of the world fractured on a sunny September morning, this graduate school assignment became one - and, honestly, perhaps the only - that would ceaselessly impact my ways of being and knowing in the years to follow. 

My 1988 light blue version published by Teachers College Press - highlighted and underlined, dotted with exclamation marks, and smudged by the remnants of tears and sweaty palms - would accompany me on educational journeys and peacebuilding adventures. My first stop was a summer camp in Lake Placid, New York, where my campers, adolescent girls from the Spanish-speaking immigrant neighborhoods of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, would entrust me with unsettled feelings of their beloved hermanos and tios announcing their military enlistment. A handful of years later, and one of those campers was a sophomore at Georgetown, tracing her fingers over the books on my shelves, pointing to CPE and recalling those conversations. 

As US military forces lit up the night sky of Baghdad with its Iraq invasion in March 2003, I was in rural southeastern Austria, then home to the European Peace University, a peace education living and learning experiment and experience with nearly 40 students holding passports from half as many countries. I read CPE again through the wise pedagogical eyes of Filipino educator, Loreta Castro, a first piece of (soon to be overwhelming) evidence of Reardon’s global presence and reverence, an American export I could be proud of. In the years to follow, I would travel back to this village, attempting to cram all I could of Reardon’s wisdom in the one week’s time I was allotted for a Peace Education module to motley crews of peacekeepers and human rights defenders. One email I kept from a student admired how I was more of a preacher than a teacher of peace education; yes, my stature of Reardon’s book was sacred, her words were holy.

Collecting data for my doctoral dissertation in war-weary southeastern Europe ten years after the 1995 signing of the Dayton Accords, I took a seat in the back of graduate level Peace Studies and Human Rights courses across higher education spaces once addressed with the country name Yugoslavia. I drank countless cups of coffee while interviewing the field’s students and professors. I was reminded time and again how Reardon was a household name in these small but mighty peacebuilding networks in war-weary places. You have Reardon, I was reminded as I broke from my interviewer responsibilities and bemoaned my country’s fascination with standardized testing that in fact did leave every child behind. I read the book again and rediscovered Reardon’s framework of peace knowledge, which provided me the lens to explore the region's intangible, intellectual heritage constituting its ways of knowing and living, necessary for its own creation and sustainability of a culture of peace. 

CPE would see me through everything from divorce proceedings to Provost Council meetings. While in Syria in 2008, I mailed a copy to a student in Iran, along with Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. I leaned on CPE to establish stability for my foray into peace parenting, and to provide me a strong values base for hiring processes and resource allocation as the Executive Director of Georgetown University’s Center for Social Justice, and the simple ways I construct a syllabus as a professor. Now, Peace Education harmonizes beautifully with what those of us in Jesuit education know as the Ignatian Pedagogical Paradigm. They are two accounts that dare to envision - and make each one of us responsible for - no less than personal, institutional, and societal transformation.   

My first attempt at writing this forward came in the winter weeks immediately preceding the nearly 365 days of an uninvited global vocabulary of social distancing and quarantine, and the impossible task of snuggly fitting a face-mask on my squirmy child. That draft was six months before the murder of George Floyd, and tanks in my home city, an inhumane militarized reaction to Black Lives Matter. In the United States, we were three quarters of a slog into what I would hope and swear and promise to myself would be the only term of a Trump presidency. And now in winter 2021, I leave the warmth of my Capitol Hill home with our pandemic rescue dog and squeak out Good mornings to dozens, no hundreds, of machine-gun doning National Guard, lining every block - a necessary reply, we are told, to the terrorist attacks in my neighborhood and against our country’s democracy by white supremacists. 

Betty, if I may, those eighty pages are a revolution of the head, heart, and hands that have the power to convene together, across time and space, our educators, political leadership, policymakers, funders, school management, and activists to create thriving, just, and humane pursuits for peace.

With warmth and in solidarity,

Andria Wisler

Executive Director, Center for Social Justice Research, Teaching & Service

Associate Teaching Professor, Justice and Peace Studies

Georgetown University

Washington, DC, United States

Introduction (2021)

Blindsided by Two Years of Turmoil, Inspirited by Two Years of Hope: A 2021 Preamble to a 2019 Introduction

This Introduction to two publications, of the same text, the 2019 Korean translation and the 2021 Peace Knowledge Press’s re-issue of the 1988 original English text of Comprehensive Peace Education, is a commentary on a foundational work in peace education. Comprehensive had some influence on the field as practiced in the final decades of the 20th century, and, in some cases, is still in use in introductory courses. Readers of both languages are presented the same original 1988 text and 2019 Introduction, in the hope that Comprehensive may be a common reading, a shared basis for varying interpretations and adaptations, and an encouragement of totally new works relevant to contemporary learning situations.  Interpretations and various adaptations of foundational works are but one route to the emergence of the new perspectives and substance of which the field is in on-going need. Now more than ever peace educators must take up the new theoretical and practical challenges posed by these critical, seemingly unprecedented times. The purpose of this Preamble is to set the Introduction in the context of these present challenges to the peace problematic.

With the 2020 draft of the Preamble to the Introduction, I extended my special greetings to those first encountering the work in the Korean language, a much appreciated recognition, not only of the utility of the work, but of the transnational and multi-cultural character of a field, striving for a global perspective and world-wide collaboration on education for a just and peaceful future for our planet. The translation makes possible mutual learning and further multi-perspective collaboration. It will, I hope, also inspire Korean educators who are new to the field to seek knowledge of and cooperation with the vibrant network of Asian peace educators that has long made the region a significant contributor to contemporary practices in peace education.  A selected list of a few of them which may also be of interest to English readers seeking knowledge of and cooperation with Asian peace educators appears at the close of this introduction.

My sincere and hearty thanks go to Professor Soon-Won Kang of Hanshin University whose Korean translation makes a significant contribution to extending the transnational and interregional communication among peace educators that has been a major energizing force in developing and sustaining the world-wide practice of peace education. The work now being done by Asian peace educators constitutes a welcome source of hope through these years of upending global turmoil.

The first draft of the Introduction was written in November 2019, well into the twenty-first Century. The first writing of the Preamble to that draft dates from the last part of 2020, a year in which a global pandemic had (and as of this writing continues) disrupted personal lives, impoverished formerly prosperous communities, deepened existing oppressions and divisions, traumatized entire societies, moved the hands on the nuclear clock closer to midnight, further endangered our planet’s biosphere, and shaken the foundational assumptions of peace education that informed Comprehensive. Published as a summary of learnings gleaned from the preceding two and half decades of peace education practice, it was intended as an offering of a few core concepts for theorizing the field. That first draft of the Introduction, written before these last two years of disaster and disorientation, follows here with a few editorial clarifications. It was intended as a review of developments of [recent] decades… that had notable effects on the peace problematic, and consequently, on the practice of peace education.  In the intervening years of 2019-2021, the context of that problematic has changed as dramatically as it had over the previous three summarized decades.

This 2021 Preamble results from a sense of urgency and peril more sharply focused on what I have come to see as a serious inadequacy in our practice.  I, along with others who claim a futures perspective, was caught unawares by the crises of these years of turmoil, unprecedented in the experience of most peace educators.  It seems I have not adequately understood the essential underlying factors of the turmoil, sharply crucial to the peace problematic as I had seen it evolve since 1988. How was it possible that in postings and publications over the past two years - particularly in The Corona Connections, posted regularly through the early days of the pandemic by the Global Campaign for Peace Education - I failed to illuminate these factors? In calling my colleagues to venture into new and uncharted pedagogical waters, how did I not observe the force of the factors that so churned and troubled the waters? These are, it now appears to me, factors that must be integrated into the field, especially in pedagogical practice. They were problems of which I and my colleagues were not unaware, nor had we neglected them.  I, for one, simply did not perceive their depth and tenacity. Neither did I grasp how they were so imbedded in nearly all peace problems and the contentions about their resolutions. Perhaps it was the isolation of the pandemic that impeded the collegial conversations through which previously, our assumptions were explored and our practices developed. Preoccupied as I was with reviewing the field’s emerging conceptualizations, and its widening view of multiple forms of violence and injustice, I failed to take into account the essential affective factors in conceptualizing the nature of what we must learn to achieve peace and justice.

Only as the anguishing year of 2020 ended did I discern the full importance of the convergence of two key elements of the peace problematic; fear and rejection of reason exacerbated by a rush to action made more explosive by a reluctance to engage in the deep reflection that understanding the peace problematic requires. I am convinced that sharply focused, reflective attention should be given to these factors to discern how they have contributed to the evolution of the present existential threats that I identify in the 2019 Introduction as the challenges the field currently must confront. Those suggestions and the learning recounted that inspired them, I believe, remain valid, but as is the case with all the approaches and frames of earlier stages, they, too, stand in need of review and assessment. I urge that the assessment take into account the affective habits of mind, not only the thinking, but also and especially the strong human feelings that have propelled us to the current critical situation that threatens our very survival. 

As we inquire into our crisis prone policies and behaviors, let us probe, as well, the underlying concerns, feelings, attitudes and views that produced them. These views and attitudes intensely informed politics and social relations in many nations throughout the world. The rise of retrogressive, nationalist authoritarianism with its tendency toward militarism and sexist repression gained the support of alarming numbers in all world regions, producing the disorienting turmoil that stymies most of us.  At the same time, global movements for human rights, gender equality, social justice, demilitarization and saving the planet are erupting in massive nonviolent manifestations, offering hope that we may make our way through the turmoil. Largely led by youth, the teens and twenties of Generation Z, anti-racist, pro-human rights, anti-repression and climate justice movements hold promising possibilities for a politics of peace.  Cultivating the possibilities for the emergence of such a politics requires transparent and truthful communication among and between contending movements.

Such communication is not likely, if we do not understand and prepare to interact with attitudes and worldviews that we see as antithetical to those that make for justice and peace.  In particular, we need to comprehend and confront the two factors I now see as essential to all our peace efforts; the fears and the rejection of reasoned reflection that feed authoritarianism and violence, and no small measure of the resistance to them. It is likely to be intellectually difficult and patience trying to come to understand those fears and that distrust of reasoning. However, only with such understanding, will we be able to engage in the requisite and extremely challenging dialogue with those whose fears and thinking differs so significantly from our own fears and worldviews. Only if we hear others with respect, might we expect that they would hear us, or respectfully listen to our fears and reasons. We need to focus on the what and why of the fears and reasons; not who, which sees persons as problems, thus obscuring the humanity of the other and the actual problems that daunt both us and our interlocutors. 

We might begin with more profound reflection on differences among peace educators ourselves as preparation for dialogues of differences. Let us acknowledge that fear of some kind affects the thinking of most of us. Learning to understanding the fears of others is the beginning of learning to engage in truthful dialogue. Nothing provokes as much violence as does fear. Nothing obscures truth more than fear. Nothing can provoke hatred more readily than fear. Nothing resists reason more than fear. Nothing seduces into acceptance of authoritarianism more effectively than fear. Nothing presents a greater challenge to peace education than fear and its enabler, rejection of reason. Nothing embodies hope so much as does courage and reasoned reflection. Nothing manifests our humanity so much as our compassion for fearing other, even as we may fear them. Fear, hope and compassion in nearly equal measures have impelled the politics of our times. How might we restrain fear as shared reasoned reflection releases hope, and compassion enables us to see and respect the humanity of our antagonists?

Over recent years, fear and dehumanization has been the subtext in the rise of authoritarian populism and nationalist fundamentalism that undermined democracies on all continents. As would-be autocrats, stoking fears of various actual and manufactured threats to well-being, and whipped up xenophobic hatred of others, a politics of alienation and polarization reached a new low. Liberals and traditionalists too often responded in kind, undeniably pushing the level of public discourse in 2020 elections in the US and other nations to the nadir of democratic process. Bringing forth contended election results, even insurrection and in some countries political assassinations.

Simultaneously, movements emerged to counter this trend, calling civil society to action inspired by the two wholly and authentically global experiences of the year 2020: citizens mobilizing support and assistance governments could (or would) not provide as COVID-19 dealt death and economic hardship to all peoples; and Black Lives Matter that became a world-wide movement for the eradication of all oppression based on identity. While fears of increasing poverty, disease and death mixed with fear of others (other races, immigrants, asylum seekers, among others) were shaken into a powerfully poisonous cocktail, infecting the body politic in various nations, an equally powerful antidote arose among those who held tenaciously to the possibility of a politics of peace and justice, to a belief in universal human dignity and equal human rights.