"This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely more beautifully and more devotedly than ever before".
- Leonard Bernstein
What is Peace Education?
Peace education is a participatory holistic process that includes teaching for and about democracy and human rights, nonviolence, social and economic justice, gender equality, environmental sustainability, disarmament, traditional peace practices, international law, and human security.
In recognition of the unprecedented need to address issues of security, war and peace, human rights and social justice, sustainable development and ecological balance, we have never needed the power of music more than we need it today.
Violence in its multiple forms, and at all levels of the global social order, is a major problem. For nearly five decades educators concerned with this issue have argued that education has a responsibility to address the related issues through instruction in our school system.
It is my belief that music as a tool of communication and transformation can reach our children and teach them the values of human rights, and create dialogue about the urgent need for world peace and environmental sustainability.
Music can promote values of dignity, equality and justice, so let's start writing it!
Check out the following links:
Breakthrough - Building Human Rights Culture
www.breakthrough.tv
Witness - See it. Film It. Change It.
www.witness.org
MoveOn.org - Democracy In Action
www.moveon.org
Cyberschoolbus - United Nations global teaching and learning project
www.un.org/Pubs/CyberSchoolBus/index.html
Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights -
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
www.unhchr.ch/udhr/index.htm
Peace Education Center Teachers College (Columbia University)
www.tc.columbia.edu/PeaceEd/iipe
