Republic of the Philippines

COTABATO STATE UNIVERSITY

Sinsuat Avenue, Cotabato City
GRADUATE SCHOOL

MAHALEAH DUMAMA-MIDTIMBANG
PA 710- Peace Process

PEACE and EDUCATION

Overview
Education is a significant contributor to peace, and appears in two of the
24 indicators in the Positive Peace Index produced by the Institute for Economics
and Peace. Education can lead to peace and be a part of ‘building back better’ by
supporting the transformation of the security situation, political institutions,
economic regeneration and social development. However, education policies can
also contribute to the escalation of conflict if they are poorly designed or
implemented. Key lessons about how education can contribute to peace, recovery,
and reconstruction include the following:  Education should be inclusive,
affordable, and accessible. It should address inequality and exclusion and provide
opportunities for previously marginalised communities.
Peace in Universities

In universities our characteristic response to a new responsibility is the addition

of a new course, a new curriculum, or at least some proposal for the acquisition of new
knowledge on the part of our students. We have every reason to doubt the wisdom of our
past responses in such situations. It is going to take something more than knowledge of
new facts to bring about a peaceful world. New courses can teach new facts, but they do
not necessarily give our students and graduates the will to build a peaceful world or the
social effectiveness for bringing such a world into being.

The plain fact is, we do not as a people understand the problem of world peace.
We do not have a sufficient determination to build a peaceful world. We do not sense
our own individual and collective responsibilities in relation to world peace. As a people
we lack the consecration to human values and the devotion to human brotherhood that
must of necessity be a foundation for a peaceful world. Perhaps most important of all we
fail to realize that it is the success of free institutions inside our own country and other
countries that is the primary requisite for the success of any international organization
any effort at the maintenance of an enduring peace. If we are interested in examining
the role of the university in building world peace, we should examine the course which
has been followed by our own country in both the international and domestic scene
since V-J Day. Through such an examination we can discover our major errors and
identify the elements of unsoundness in our domestic and world leadership. From a
study of these errors we can, I believe, map a sound emphasis for the university as it
seeks to make a contribution to enduring world peace.

Key lessons about how education can contribute to peace, recovery, and
reconstruction include the following:

 Education should be inclusive, affordable, and accessible. It should address

inequality and exclusion and provide opportunities for previously marginalised
communities.

 Education can help develop identities and deal with the legacies and grievances of
previous conflict, improving social cohesion and moving societies towards
reconciliation.

 The provision of an education service may in itself reduce the risk of conflict, if a
population feels provided for.

 Education and skills training can help reduce the risk of people turning to or
returning to conflict, and can support economic regeneration.

 Education of former combatants can reduce grievances and support reintegration

by giving ex-combatants skills needed for work.

 Early Childhood Development interventions have been shown to have a positive

impact on peace.

 Access to education can reduce attitudes towards and participation in violence,

although it can also raise awareness of injustice and discrimination.

 Social, political and cultural issues must be addressed alongside the delivery of
education.

 Conflict sensitivity should be incorporated into educational planning to ensure

that curricula and delivery do not reinforce inequalities or create divisions.

 Schools must be peaceful environments.

 Peace Leading to Education
Peace can provide opportunities for positive educational outcomes. It is
recognised that there are many overlapping and interlinking issues between this section
and the previous section. Children and education systems often suffer during violent
conflict. However, the immediate period after a conflict provides a window of
opportunity to implement strategies for recovery and reconstruction, including the
delivery of education (UNESCO 2011).
This window of peace that follows conflict is the ideal time to implement
initiatives such as peace education, as there is the opportunity to reinvent social spaces.
Post-conflict settings present a chance for policy reform and systemic change as well as
rapid development (Webster, 2013). Education initiatives can provide an early ‘peace
dividend’. Issues of access must be addressed before, during and after conflict, as a
preventative strategy (Smith, 2010). A synthesis report which focused on the role of
education in peacebuilding in Lebanon, Nepal and Sierra Leone found that neither
UNICEF nor the education sector has been strongly integrated into the UN
peacebuilding agenda within countries (Novelli and Smith, 2011). The authors suggest
that UNICEF should take a lead on peacebuilding, but must consider the implications of
how this may affect perceptions and how peacebuilding relates to other priority areas.
Education in emergencies must prioritise the protection of children. It must
respond to the negative impacts of conflict on education. Such programmes can be
framed in terms of humanitarian response (Smith et al., 2011). The authors of a 2011
study urged USAID to include education in the USAID Office of Foreign Disaster
Assistance (OFDA) mandate (Burde et al., 2011). There is still debate about how best to
include education in frontline humanitarian aid responses. Evidence suggests those
involved in education and emergencies networks are aware of the benefits and are
working to deliver this. However, those working within other sectors have still to be
convinced (Smith, 2011).

Why integrate education into peace processes?

Education should be considered an important element both of peace agreements and of

the peace-building processes that peace agreements are a part of, for four reasons:

 Peace agreements can determine the agenda for the postconflict period, to include
funding and program priorities of governments, donors, and humanitarian
organizations alike. Including education in a peace agreement thus makes it more likely
that education will receive attention after a conflict period, including funding and that
the impact of the conflict on the education system will be addressed as well as the role
that education may have played in the outbreak of conflict
 Addressing education in peace agreements by, for instance, committing the state to
providing wider access to education, can signal that the state cares about the population
and is committed to keeping and building peace by transforming the roots of conflict,
thus restoring faith in the government and defusing dissent. Explicitly addressing
education in peace agreements can thus constitute an important incentive for
individuals to lay down arms, particularly where educational exclusion is at the root of
young people’s motivations to fight. Therefore, incorporating education into peace
agreements can be critical in bringing the direct physical violence of a conflict to an end.
Education systems play a vital role in building long-term, positive peace that transforms
the roots of conflict and helps a country move from a fractured society to a new cohesive
entity.

 Perhaps the most important rationale is that education is a fundamental right,

enshrined within the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, equally applicable in
times of war and peace.

It is not enough, of course, simply to include the mention of education in a

peace agreement. The goals and targets for the education system must be
mutually agreed upon, and developed using the input of many concerned
parties. The peace agreement should reference education in the context of
reinforcing security, child protection, economic development, and
supporting socio-political transformations within a society. Adequate
funding and technical support for these educational objectives must also
be specified.

Whole School Approach in the PHILIPPINES

1. Curriculum aim and objectives should promote team work in both teaching and
learning because due to individual competition and performance one becomes
insensitive and indifferent about the feelings of others
2. Pedagogies prone for group work like Project or problem solving should be used
more in the classroom in order to accommodate everybody in the process. In different
pedagogy classes, students should be sensitized about the contribution made by the
different peoples in enriching the related discipline. The stories of famous scientists,
reformers, and philanthropist should be shared by the concerned teacher.
3. There should be specific sessions in the school to draw the attention about the
diversities in a positive manner. There should be proper orientations about the students
belonging to different cultures. Prominent people from the different background –
religion, region, gender etc. should be invited on regular basis to remove stereotypes
among the children Similarly documentaries, movies related with peace or showing
repercussions of violence should also be given due exposure in order to sustain the
utility of peace.
4. There should be fair treatment by the teachers in dealing with the students. Teachers
should be properly trained and oriented about the issue of dealing with diversities in a
dignified manner. Their issues should be properly addressed. Teachers should be given
due regarding as per their competencies and skills. A contended teacher would
automatically spread pleasantries among students.
5. The nature of learning in the classroom should be shift from the individual to group
learning. The importance should be given to the behaviour rather the academic
performance. The students who are punctual, sincere, and honest and volunteer in
curbing violence and spreading peace should be specially rewarded. In this context, the
students who show any inclination for violence should be properly counselled by taking
cognizance of their parents.
6. More and more efforts should be given to meditation, yoga and physical exercises on a
mandatory basis to create peaceful environment. 7. The aim of education should try to
promote true peace by promoting inner peace, social peace and peace with nature.

Political Function of Schools

As for the school’s political function, their role is crossed by socio-political
categories framed beyond the educational context. (Zembylas et al., 2016), affirms that
not to run the risk of victimizing and perpetrating structural exclusion towards women
or towards those who have historically been marginalized, it is imperative to empower
these populations and expose the exclusions and other social injustices they have been
the subject.
This purpose of peacebuilding is coherent with what (Pugh et al., 2016) states,
which posits that political education should not only emphasize how students learn to
identify the symptoms of social problems and their possible causes but also how to get
involved in the development of proposals that overcome the effects of the exclusion of
large sectors of the population. Based on these statements, it could be inferred that one
of the political functions of the educational institution is to generate cultural and social
transformations favourable to the consolidation of peace practices and values,
representations of equality and justice, inclusion, good living, and democracy.
For this educational purpose, a possible strategy is for girls, boys, and young
people to learn about the history of the country, accurately identify the implications that
structural violence has brought on the living conditions of citizens and discuss social
challenges, economic, cultural, and political of what it means to learn to live together in
a nation that calls itself a social State of law (Gallagher, 2016). This is how the school
has a comprehensive work of the problems faced by its members and a transforming
work of culture and society. Some experts have identified that education is a powerful
tool for these transforming effects, and without which, the developments in the culture,
science, and technology of a country could not occur (Milton & Barakat, 2016). Novelli
et al., 2017), on the other hand, from a psychological and philosophical point of view,
establishes that the school contributes to developing the abilities of the students so that
they learn to see the world from the perspective of the other and to understand the
fundamentals that result in cooperation and reciprocity for the construction of peace.
From this perspective, the school must reflect with special care on how social
interactions are fostered and strengthened in the function of good living and human
flourishing.
Complementarily, it must create spaces to discuss and propose strategies
conducive to establishing democratic and inclusive relations and formalizing deeply
democratic procedures, based on criteria of justice, care, and recognition, and
committed to promoting rights (Zelizer, 2015). Given these mentions of the school’s
political function, the construction of peace and coexistence in educational institutions
constitutes an educational intention not only possible and executable but also of a
transcendental nature for a country (Hon-Chan, 2017). In this sense, the notion
according to which the school, transformation of practices, discourses, and teaching
methods to construct peace scenarios, contributes to the development of attitudes,
values, is configured in the knowledge and political practices (Goren & Yemini, 2017). As
mentioned earlier, to strengthen democracy, the citizen-political exercise and the
practices of concertation of conflicts, based on reflections and discussions about the
moral correlations that underlie all political practice (Adonteng-Kissi et al. , 2019).

Integration of Education for Peace with Peace Education

During the deliberation revolving around education to be used as catalyst, the
third component in the model is expecting the integration of the education for peace
with the peace education because both are complementary to each other. It is true that if
education has to catalyze the process of peace and ensure the peaceful coexistence, then
it has to revamp its curricular goals and to train all the participants accordingly –
ranging from administration to learners. During this process peace education can play
significant role.
The strategies, models and programmes which are running in the name of peace
education can be used for reference. Peace Education as a separate part of the
curriculum is aiming to create conflict free zones in the world by imbibing the desired
habits among the stake holders. As a strategy, it is intensively promoting the use of
meditation, art, religious reading, training of the students and teachers comprehensively
to appreciate the values of peaceful coexistence. But due to its segregated nature and
differential treatment, it could not exert its major impact upon the practitioners.
With this context, it seems viable to merge the practices of peace education with
the education for peace in the way that each component of educational endevour
irrespective of its nature can spread the idea of peace building and relevance of peaceful
coexistence in varied manner.
The curriculum, pedagogies, transactions, evaluation as an inherent part of
school practices should create ideal space for the learners to imbibe the practices which
can lead to cooperation, trust, empathy, concern and regard rather than Universal
Journal of Educational Research 5(6): 911-917, 2017 917 the opposite.
The prominent goals of peace education like
(a) establishing a cooperative, not a competitive, relationship among all relevant
parties;
(b) ensuring that all relevant parties are skilled in engaging in political discourse
and creative decision making that includes an open-minded discussion of diverse views;
(c) ensuring that relevant parties seek agreements that are mutually beneficial
and that maximize joint outcomes; and
(d) inculcating into all relevant parties the values underlying consensual peace
are some of the examples which can be directly applied in the Education for peace on a
broader level.