| Abstract: | Peace education activities, widely contrasting and often mutually inconsistent, may be understood as constituting a dialectic in which each step is based on fundamental human reaction patterns mobilized as incentives. Although neither thesis, ‘Sounding the Alarm’, nor anthithesis, ‘Identifying Causes’, is adequate on its own for building peace, each is a necessary stage in development towards the synthesis, ‘Symmetric Peace Education’. According to this concept, peace can only be achieved through co-operation between the parties threatening or threatened by each other; and the task of symmetric peace education is to bring both sides and involved neutrals together to work out a basis of common values and joint activities while protecting the identity and integrity of all participants. On the micro-level, in schools, appropriate exercises can be designed to enable pupils to learn, from their own experiences of conflict, symmetrical and constructive habits in communication. Extension to the macro-, international, level may be achieved by representative groups of educators working together without destructive confrontation to produce common peace education packages: these would be used symmetrically by mutual agreement in countries currently rearming against each other. A different approach is proposed for bringing together groups of other professional people in ‘prepared, constructive confrontations’ in order to reduce distrust and increase mutual understanding. The express purpose for the foundation of Unesco was to build peace; and by virtue of this mandate and the nature of its constitution, the organization is uniquely placed to promote symmetric peace education in the ways described. |
