Education for Peace: What I wrote in 2008-9

Posted on February 7, 2015 by admin

I believe education should help to plant the seeds of peace within individuals, society, nation, and our shared globe, simply because only peaceful people can love and serve others constructively in the humankind society in order to bring about positive changes to it. Education that follows the trail paved roughly and inadequately for us by the materialistic, capitalistic efforts and ignorant perspectives of life will continue to serve the status quo, which structurally has generated ignorance, oppression, and thus violence at all levels.

At the personal level, all individuals will need to find the peace in them through the right kind of education that promotes critical personal reflections and actions more intensely, rather than gearing toward test-taking or material success pursuit. In the real world, a balance between different purposes may be needed, but peace must be a major part of the equation. On the societal scale, peace-oriented education cannot be any more important nowadays.  The learners must be encouraged to see the world from multiple perspectives and to reassign their roles in bringing about positive changes. In the end, global education, peace education, civil education and the like must be encouraged or integrated around the world where ignorance, nationalism, patriotism, and violence forcefully prevail. Talk is merely enough, and it can be cheap; however, unless we talk in a caring, sincere and regular manner, we could forget the importance of planting and taking care of the sees of peace.  Actions must be taken regularly, too, so the peace seeds will grow and yield fruits to the humankind.

I have worriedly noticed that hatred, mutual misunderstanding, lack of critical thinking, ethno-centricism, greed, ignorance, unkind pride, narrow-mindedness, and extremism are creating tensions and violence among the humankind at all levels. Education is the most powerful tool to fight against all these downfalls of the human race. I am therefore very interested in how to incorporate all these in education of all types.

Here I will share all that I have learned about this new field.

Other Sources of Food for Thought

MIT Opencourseware
http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html

Stanford on iTunes
http://itunes.stanford.edu/

Columbia VDO Archive
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/news/media/06/

Harvard KSG Video Archive
http://www.iop.harvard.edu/events_forum_archive.html

MIT archives
http://mitworld.mit.edu/video_index.php

Princeton Lectures Video
http://www.princeton.edu/WebMedia/lectures/

Stanford GSB (Audio&Video)
http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/news/audiovideo.html

Ethics Video (Philosophy)
http://ethics.sandiego.edu/video/

Idea Channel
http://www.ideachannel.com/

ฺUC Berkeley webcasthttp://webcast.berkeley.edu/

University of Chicago research video
http://research.uchicago.edu/highlights/search.phtml

Stanford video archive
http://news-service.stanford.edu/videos/2006.html 

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Freire’s Empowering Education

Posted on February 7, 2015 by admin

Freire believes that education is not neutral and does not take place in vacuum; it takes place in the context of people’s lives. Freire maintains that we need to ask the following questions: Who does education serve and for what purposes? Does education encourage the students to become a social subject or the agent for social changes, or does it push them to become  an object or one who accepts restricted roles within the status quo. Does education just impose a fixed role or norm on the students or does it engage them in questioning the taken for granted that happen in daily life and participate in social and political life of the society. Freire essentially views education as the practices that invite the students to believe in themselves and their potential as a learner who already possesses some valuable knowledge.

Human liberation is Freire’s ultimate goal in educating people. He sees oppression as the inevitable theme in social and historical contexts. Thus, the oppressed should be liberated from the oppressor and their tools that exist within the status quo. In education, to help liberate the people, the teachers must not practice the “Banking education,” and should instead use a “dialogue approach” in which both the learners and the teacher participate as equals and colearners in constructing social knowledge. The group must engage in critical thinking by “posing problems in such a way as to have participants uncover root causes of their place in society– the socioeconomic, political, cultural, and historical context of personal lives. (Wallerstein & Bernstein, 1999, 56). Freire’s notion of empowering education is more than critical thinking in that the people or the learners must go beyond the perception of the above self and contexts; they must take social actions (praxis) that will help them overcome powerlessness and achieve control over their own lives.

Wallerstein, N. & Bernstein, E., (1999). Empowerment Education. in Shor, I & Pari, C. (1999). Education is Politics: Critical teaching across differences, K-12. NH: Boynton/Cook Publishers, Inc.

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