The paper will examine how the study of peace is pursued in education.
It argues that existing curricula on peace education are limited and proposes that it is in the minds of of of man.
If you forgive the phrase in inverted commas are that a more radical approach needs to needs to be thought of.
If we are going to construct the psychological and physical defence force,
a psychological and physical and physiological philosophical defences of of of peace,
the paper builds a little bit on Harbourmaster's theory of communication and social action,
although I won't delve too deeply into that and more recently available perspectives in social semiotics to engineer, I hope,
a more distinct methodology based on the notions of designing and making this this this sort of model that I'll explore.
But just in brief outline terms, I think is yet to be fully evaluated.
But as this paper will show,
I think there are many signs of promise when it was tested by myself some years ago now in South Africa amongst secondary secondary education,
secondary education students. Now I am to look at higher education first.
This certainly disturbingly recent examples of intolerance amongst insiders in South Africa and xenophobia towards outsiders.
And this has begun to suggest to me that in terms of a search for peace.
South Africa perhaps needs to go beyond the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
It's not difficult to see what motivates this this question.
In 2008, there was a national outcry over video footage that came out of the University of the Free State.
It showed black employees of the university being being being forced to kneel and eat food
that had been urinated upon by a group of students who made the video a few months later.
The University of Johannesburg, a local newspaper, reported that the rooms of black students were thrashed by groups of white students.
And there were several assaults and several separate incidences of rather frightful name calling at North West University,
which was the old University of of of Putschists Room.
White students set up a face book group and on there, apart from racially abusive words and comments posted by members.
The group also apparently posted a photograph of a white man holding a gun while posing over the trophy of a young black boy lying on the ground.
This is not one sided. Black students, on the other hand, have been become increasingly more militant in a narrow nationalistic way.
Africa for Africans, we see, sometimes remains a popular slogan.
And this is illustrated by the fact that the forum for Black Student Journalists recently ejected a white colleague from a meeting.
So all of this is disturbing and so disturbing that the Ministry of Education in South Africa set up a
commission recently of enquiry to look at what is exactly going on in higher education institutions.
So for me, this is of launches. Some questions fall for this paper.
Contrary to expectations and hopes for a country free of intergroup conflict,
these incidents at several South African universities highlight that the national
capacity for forgiveness and acceptance has perhaps eroded over the years.
Perhaps in some quarters, it has never been established.
So the growing intolerance then of of different national groups in South Africa Festival exposes the question about how widespread,
but also indeed how deep the attempts to achieve acceptance and to minimise
intolerance that have been spearheaded by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission had
had had had gone South Africa went to extraordinary lengths to establish restorative
justice in an attempt to to draw a line under the atrocities of the past.
We see the. That of recent social science research on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that explored whether,
in fact, it is a sufficient basis for a lasting peace has come up with some quite interesting findings.
Political scientist Wilson conducted an extensive fieldwork amongst African urban communities and argues that
the Truth and Reconciliation Commission had little effect on on popular ideas of justice as retribution.
Wilson looked at the religious redemptive model and how that was received in townships in around Johannesburg, particularly in Sharpeville,
the very famous sharbel where massacres took place on the 21st of March in nineteen sixteen,
which launched some of the more pop popular resistance by the ANC and the Pan Africanist Congress at the time.
He argues that people came forward less as a deep commitment to reconciliation and nation building, but more for practical reasons,
such as the restoration of relationships between victims,
where suspicion and stigma had wrongly been attached to one person or to a family in communities.
That reconciliation through truth rarely prompted victims and perpetrators to actually come together.
Wilson found that a strong desire for revenge continue to persist in South Africa,
despite the efforts of the TIAR see the TLC version of human rights as reconciliation did little to challenge the
prevalence of revenge in townships and because it could not meaningfully engage with a punitive view of justice.
Again, the word examinations of more diversion paths to retributive justice in neighbouring townships of Charleville boy bettong.
And despite the rhetoric from political leaders and the press, that widely condemned retribution,
Wilson found is inconsistent with feelings amongst much of the public, especially as crime continued to become a highly salient issue.
So while this institution, TLC,
was widely praised abroad and in international conferences on post-conflict reconstruction and reconciliation around the globe,
it remained largely peripheral to the lives of those living in townships that were that were wracked by by revenge killings.
So many, I think, in South Africa believe that the process remains in complete.
I just want to to skip really I don't want to spend a huge amount of time on this.
So that that raises the question about the breadth and indeed the depth of a process that South Africa undertook, but is a similar similar process.
The processes have been undertaken, of course, in Rwanda, in Sierra Leone, etc.,
and a lot of a lot of faith invested in in the impact of of such reconciliation, truth and reconciliation, redemptive processes.
For me, however, the question remains one that really begs deeper questions about all,
I suppose that really argues for an approach to building peace that starts much earlier and that is much more sustained.
I did some studies of various studies in schools in South Africa,
and particularly I looked at recently the processes of D racial de racialisation and citizen ship formation in South African schools.
Some schools have formally catered exclusively for white Africans speaking communities merely accommodated other national groups.
They complied with provisions under the Constitution that access may not be denied on grounds of race, status or religion.
But rather than encouraging a curriculum that encouraged diversity,
they created parallel streams of of learning so that there were virtually two schools on one site.
One school, the teachers, the curriculum in English to predominantly black students,
while the other teachers are virtually the same curriculum to almost exclusively white Afrikaans speaking students.
For me, this was excuse me, a hugely important insight that although on the face of it,
South Africa had begun to be racialized its institutions, its schools.
The reality was that many of these schools were not really stretching to a curriculum that encouraged positive diversity.
Rather, it was very much acting by the Constitution, providing and not denying access,
but not doing very much in in in curriculum sense to encourage a to encourage a a way in which students
could learn about each other through working together on on on on certain aspects of their schooling,
I suppose, in that paper. And now I think I'm I'm still very wary about the effects of the so-called equal status contact hypothesis.
I don't think it's enough to put people together in the same environment, the same institution,
if they aren't really coming together to struggle over some particularly important and meaningful issue.
And so, really, without going into I mean, I can can describe the sort of model and so on.
I don't think I'll do that. I might leave that to come up in questions. But I suppose what I'm really arguing for is a very simple notion.
The notion is not so much the study of peace in schools, but this.
But a curriculum method that encourages students to design together their social futures.
By this, I mean that we cannot take out of the curriculum.
It should be a clear curriculum is important in that it should deal with questions relevant to any society's attempt at chance,
at transition and transformation. Take on board the important questions about employment, about social issues, health, water, sanitation and so on.
Unless those those things are that that a curriculum focuses on and a study, studies of peace very often become adjunct.
They become additional models.
They're quickly forgotten about when the mathematics curriculum demands a test or the history curriculum demands a test.
And so really, the model I'm arguing for is one in which.
Drawing on these available theories of social hermeneutics,
action and so on is to allow students and I and I will expand on this in
questions if it does come up to allow students to work together on design tasks.
Design is an important aspect of the curriculum in the UK, for example.
It was introduced in 1990, in the 1990s and just one newspaper article in the year,
a year or so after it had been introduced read The Sky's the Limit for Children at a Lancashire primary school,
for they are designing an airliner with the help of British Aerospace.
The eight and nine year olds have used computers and other high tech equipment provided by
the giant plane maker to plan a supersonic jet capable of carrying a thousand passengers.
One of the teachers say that ideas can be very difficult but joyfully difficult.
They want to be able to fly thousand passengers to Australia in a few hours using solar power.
And we let their fertile little minds run riot. I would love to find an airliner which does not pollute the atmosphere.
And it's interesting how they picked up on that in designing the airliner.
The children have come up with some spectacularly new ideas.
They've learnt about the principles of flight of lift, the weight of thrust of drag.
And I've come up with a design that is 130 metres long and weighs twice as much as a jumbo, etc. And it was these ideas that I found fascinating.
And in the little project I tried in South Africa, it was precisely that that I introduced a design task into the curriculum,
which was about an important issue at the time in the rural school to try and find a design for for a a low a low cost water filtration system.
And this allowed students who for the first time have come together in a non-racial sort of way,
but have come together also with very different modes of meaning, making not only language,
but ways in which meaning was made through through spatial awareness or ways in which meaning was made clearly through linguistic awareness,
but auditory awareness, etc. And the study very much looked at how these students engage and gauged around the task.
That was a vital task for the vital for societal transformation.
But it was in that I felt that a study of peaceful social futures had become embedded rather than a model in which the
study of peace was adjunct and additional to quite important issues that a curriculum in any country were to deal with.