Peace Education in Formal Schools: Why is it Important and How Can it be Done?
Brooks, Caroline, and Basma Hajir. 2020. International Alert
This report adds to the literature on peace education by highlighting the importance of formal schools in providing knowledge and skills but also in shaping social and cultural values, norms, attitudes, dispositions, etc. The report recommends that education should promote an ethos that aligns with Western normative values and principles of peace, especially by internalising skills, competencies and values. Teacher training, argues the report, should focus on socio-political outcomes as well as individual approaches.
The report further posits that peace education in formal settings need to be advanced within formal school systems by promoting healthy relationships and school culture, and address issues of structural and cultural violence within educational settings, but also by connecting to wider community practices.
This report formalises a lot of the theory that I have looked at in my research and falls somewhere closer to the practice side of the theory-practice dialectic that makes up educational praxis, and therefore is important in understanding a fuller factor in peace education.