The Fundamental Purposes of a Pedagogy of Peace

Abstract

Comprehensive Peace Education, the collection of essays from which this essay is selected, being among the first general theoretical works in the field, was received as a useful contribution to a field still seeking to define itself several decades into its current phase. The term comprehensive peace education was coined in attempt to bring some cohesion to the multiple and varied forms of curriculum and instruction practiced as peace education. I sought to find not only common social purposes, but to identify the foundational concepts that lead educators to see their respective materials and practices as peace education in the 1980s. I found that all were informed by a compatible set of social values, but few were cast in the broader holism or clear conceptual frameworks that I perceived as essential to educating toward citizens’ capacities to conceive and work toward the achievement of a transformed world order. That educational goal, I believed, required systematic, holistic and multi-disciplinary thinking. The book was comprised of primarily previously published attempts to argue for the holistic and essentially normative approach to the field, an approach that I asserted to be consistent with the values that characterized the affective goals of the field as they were developed during the first two decades of my experience in the developmental process.