Peace Education: An introduction.

What is peace?

That is the question we need to ask ourselves.

In our world today we are presently plagued with wars that are fast getting out of control.

The way children have been educated now turned adults, has brought about these conflicts that they have not been able to resolve.

As Maria Montessori told us, it is the child of today that will become the man of tomorrow.

Parents and educators must prepare the way for tomorrow’s peacemakers and peacekeepers through the way we educate today’s children.

How can we help them to do this?

One of the cornerstones of the Montessori way is Peace Education. We must teach peace in our homes and classrooms.

Maria Montessori said that politicians view peace as a time when we can win wars and a time when we subjugate other people.

But really, peace needs to be
a spirituality within a person that makes them live with others in peace and harmony, without having to fight and gain prominence over the other.

How do we achieve this mentality?

One of the best ways in our present world as educators is to ensure that the child is close to nature.

The Aboriginals in Australia believe strongly that if a man is close to nature, he will have less appetite for battles and wars or be discontented with his neighbour.

They also found that the less a person is connected to nature, the more likely is there to be friction between him and nature, or him and his fellow humans.

So for us to help our children we must help them grow into people who are interested in keeping the peace through first learning to appreciate the natural world.

We need to ensure that the child knows their world and understands how it functions.

Without helping our children to understand their environment and understand their world, we can’t groom children who will be peaceful.

Understanding plants and animals, the work of the Sun and it’s importance to life on earth, the work of water and the air are all so important to the child understanding and appreciating how everything is interrelated and connected.

Enabling a child to become intelligent, and knowledgeable about things that have nothing to do with nature only, creates a problem for the world. Therefore please do not just follow trends ensure that the basics are always addressed.

This means that we will not just teach Technology, Computing and Robotics, but we will start with the basics, Biology, Geography, History before branching out to what man has created.

In today’s world we must recognize that we have 2 worlds the natural world and the Supra natural world ( man made world). It seems that we are beginning to concentrate on the latter to the detriment of the former!

If we are going to live peacefully, children need to understand their world. They need to understand the interrelatedness of things around them, and by things I mean the natural world. They need to understand that everything is connected in the cosmos.

They need to see the functions of every single living being that exists on the face of the earth and see how they work hand in hand together with other elements of earth.

When the child appreciates this, they will also appreciate that every single one of us has a cosmic duty.

We have something that we have been asked to come to do on this Earth and each one of us helps the other person to live a fulfilled life.

The mechanic, doctor, baker, teacher, bus driver, all professions are needed to work hand in hand to enable our societies to flourish.

Teach them to appreciate each other. One is not more important than the other.

So if we fight each other, if we disrespect each other, if we cannot live together in peace and harmony, we will not be able to fulfil our tasks and we will not be able to live a life that is worth living.

Children who understand this can live better fulfilled lives as they grow into adults.

So I ask again, what is it that we need to do to help our children achieve this?

One of the most important things is also to help them love themselves, to understand themselves, to know themselves.

There is no need for them to spend their precious time only thinking about all the presents their parents will give them for Christmas.

Or think:

What would I like to eat today?

What am I going to watch on television?

What new game will I buy this weekend?

Will Daddy take us to Shoprite (the shopping mall) on Sunday?

No!

The important things are things like.

What do I want to learn today?

What am I curious about?

What would I like to draw or read today?

How can I help someone today?

Those are the kinds of questions that the children need to constantly be asking themselves.

It is the way we direct them, that we help them to understand themselves.

This will help them live in harmony with each other in the classroom and a curriculum that is cosmos-focused is going to enable them to see what is most important in life.

Children who think about what they are curious about, what they’re interested in, what they want to learn, or how they’re going to help somebody today, are better suited to live in peace and promote peace in their communities.

Our children will learn to live in peace and harmony with others as they grow older, but children who are just self-centred, who are thinking about what they are going to eat, what they are going to wear, are not going to be able to live in peace with others.

They will be competing with everybody else and that is the danger of promoting a self-worth centered on always coming first and surpassing others.

No humility, just the need to be better than everyone else. Our system promotes greed and jealousy…

This is one prominent reason why we are always at war in the world.

Humans are now oblivious to the fact that we need each other to live in peace and harmony.

The Montessori education brings to the table a system that can help repair this damage which we will explore in another post.

I hope this has helped us in some way to understand how we can begin to look at teaching Peace in our classrooms.

More details to follow later.