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Title: PHILOSOPHY OF
PEACE EDUCATION IN A POSTMODERN ERA ,
By: Gur-Ze'ev, Ilan, Educational Theory, 0013-2004, June 1, 2001, Vol. 51, Issue 3
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PHILOSOPHY OF PEACE EDUCATION IN A POSTMODERN ERA
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Peace education is
currently enjoying the support and appreciation of a variety of theoretical
orientations and political positions. Enlightened modernists and
"soft" postmodernists, multiculturalists, feminists, critical
thinkers, and liberals all celebrate the new fashion.
An interesting set of
assumptions stands behind this general appreciation. It is important to note
the conviction that peace should be sought, longed for, or struggled for.
Another central assumption is that peace is the opposite of violence or
conflict. Still another central assumption is that it is possible to educate
for peace or for the promotion of peace, in one way or another, and that it is
justified and desirable to invest the proper means to do so. In this essay I
wish to question these assumptions. I will argue that peace education is part
and parcel of the reality it pretends to change. The distinction between peace
and violence (or conflict) is not unproblematic. I will argue that the
justifications that are common in current discussions of peace education not
only serve various violences (which peace education fails to reflect upon and
challenge); peace education is itself a manifestation of those violences. I
conclude by addressing the possibilities for an alternative to the current
trends in peace education.
In this essay I do not reconstruct in detail the
similar or conflicting tendencies in current peace education -- suffice it to
pinpoint the variations in their propositions, aims, and orientations. Under
such circumstances, in fact, it is quite misleading to speak about "peace
education" as a monolithic entity. We would do better to speak of various
theories and practices within current peace education. In this essay,
"peace education" as a general term is an abstraction and its
usefulness carries a price which I will try to justify.
Most current peace education activities manifest good
will but little theoretical coherence or philosophical elaboration concerning
the propositions, aims, methods, and evaluation of their effects and their
meaning. In my view, many of the difficulties and shortcomings peace education
practitioners face are not challenged because of this lack of conceptual work
and reflection. In a certain sense this is not always a bad thing, since at
times the naivete of the practitioners and their public is a productive or
potentially productive element in normalizing educational processes. At times philosophical
work is understood as unnecessary, artificial, or even dangerous for this
educational cause. Such an attitude also holds concerning the divide between
modernist and postmodernist discourses.
Many versions of peace education work within the framework
of modernist technical reason, manifested through various positivist,
pragmatic, and functionalist views of knowledge, which pay scant attention to
the social and cultural context and the violence that produces their yardsticks
and conceptions of knowledge, values, aims, and imagination, as well as their
own identity. There is however an additional idealist moral dimension that must
be addressed with special sensitivity -- the concept of universal human rights.
The source of many of these versions of peace education is religious (mainly
Christian); others are humanist of various kinds. However, they are all united
in tying resistance against violence or the prevention of conflicts to human
rights as an a historic, essential, universalistic phenomenon.
The concept of universal human rights is prima facie
modernist. It is rooted in an essentialist concept of the human subject as an
entity whose characteristics are universally valid. Its ends or potentials are
conceived as rooted in its essence. This concept related to peace education
even before it acquired its current title, formalization, and
institutionalization at the end of the nineteenth century from John Dewey and
after World War I from the progressive educational movement.
Like many other activists of peace education of his day
(except the pacifists), Dewey did not base his peace education on moral grounds
but on pragmatic political arguments.[1] But here too, as everywhere else,
Dewey's pragmatism is founded on Enlightenment concepts of the aim of knowledge
and the potentials of the human subject, and is to be seen as part of the
humanist tradition despite its rhetorical divorce from metaphysics.
The realization of human potentials by humanist
education accompanied by social changes would prevent the conditions for war,
Dewey thought. And since he understood peace as the absence of war, he had
great hope in the restructuring of the curriculum and pedagogy in order to
enhance the education of a reflective and nondogmatic public, which would not easily
be manipulated into warfare. Within such a framework,
History is not the study of heroes, but an account
of social development; it provides us with knowledge
of the past which contributes to the solution of
social problems of the present and the future....
before starting with history as such it would be a
good idea to identify the important problems of the
present-day society.[2]
Since he identified peace with the elevation of
humanity and the development of rational and pragmatically enlightened human
capacities, he understood the development of geography and history studies as
instruments for peace. His project was not limited to the American situation or
a specific time frame, but was part of a liberal-universalistic orientation
sensitive to differences, contexts, and changes.
Yet it remained fundamentally contextual: Western,
humanistic, liberal, and enlightened. In general this also holds for the work
of the central figure in peace education during the last generation, Johan
Galtung. Galtung believed that "ultimately, peace research is an effort to
put Man together again, an effort to transcend all these borders and divisions.
. .in order to arrive at something more truthful to the miracle that is Man."[3]
Some scholars think that peace education continues the
progressive education articulated by Dewey. Within this trend John Friesen and
Edith Wieler hold that current feminist and multicultural peace education advocates
Dewey's appreciation for democratic principles when it maintains that its
approach will further social progress and global stability by enhancing
understanding among nations.[4] This trend in peace education is part of a
larger effort to integrate emancipatory dimensions in Dewey's thought and the
neo-Marxist tradition with some aspects of current postmodernist discourses, as
manifested in the work of Henry Giroux.[5]
These efforts are always highly problematic, as evinced
by the various efforts to construct a postmodern critical pedagogy in face of
the effort to obtain a difficult or (perhaps) impossible balance among the
autonomy of the subject and her contingency, the possibility of a priori value
judgments, the universal validity of truth claims, and the possibility of
nonrepressive communication. Not only do various modern orientations take part
in peace education; "soft" postmodernists do too, in both the
practice and the philosophical justifications of essentialism, universalism, and
transcendentalism. Some trends in the Israeli multiculturalist and peace
movements are bona fide manifestations of this phenomenon.[6] In the case of
peace education, the coexistence of these two trends is inexorably modernist in
its assumptions, even when using a fashionable soft postmodern rhetoric in
feminist, multiculturalist, and critical arenas. At the same time, a large part
of peace education field activity and theoretical elaboration is modern, and
even premodern, as in the case of various religious educational centers.
Another part of this activity is administered or heavily supported by
governmental agencies, and still another part by the United Nations.
Substantial work is also done by NGOs.
Postmodern sensitivity to the contingent stance of
values and truth claims; the refusal to accept universal validity claims; and
the rejection of any general theory of foundationalism, essentialism, and
transcendentalism, are in direct conflict with the Enlightenment's modern
ideals and its philosophical tradition. Their implicit conservation without
their rearticulation or transformation should be addressed. Galtung identified
the unreflective use of the term "peace education" and the lack of
theoretical elaboration of the foundations of the practitioner's work in this
field.[7] Galtung himself, however, worked within the modernist framework and
certainly did not challenge peace education and standard peace research from a
postmodernist orientation. So far, the only work that explicitly set itself the
task of articulating a postmodern critique of current peace education has
failed to realize its promise in all but its title.[8]
Some feminist-oriented peace education programs
explicitly connect themselves to Dewey's philosophy and its concept of problem-solving
via the practice of conflict resolution. They do so while emphasizing the
importance of "value clarification" as a reaction to current attempts
to rationalize patriotism and justify ever-growing investments in armament. The
idea here is that
Children must learn to be peacemakers in order to
survive in the nuclear age. They need an education that
affirms life and encourages new thinking about
conflict, progress, and peacemaking. Feminist educators
can play an important role in peace education by
helping children understand the connections between
militarism and patriarchy.[9]
The central part of patriarchy and sex roles is
sometimes complemented by a retreat to human nature and
universal rights that feminist peace education is
committed to.[10]
The lack of a socially oriented philosophical
elaboration of peace education made possible the positivistic views about
"conflict resolution" within media studies and communication in the
1980s and the great hopes of using the Interact in the service of peace
education during the 1990s.[11]
Even peace education within the framework of current
critical pedagogy has sometimes had an essentialist conception of human rights
and a positivistic conception of "true" critical knowledge in the
service of peace education. This is occasionally so, even when moral
imagination is prized as against instrumental rationality and technical
reason.[12] This trend is rooted already in the thinking of the Frankfurt
School thinkers in the first phase
of their thought and in the concept of dialogue in Paulo Freire and even in
present-day thinkers of critical pedagogy such as Giroux.[13]
This line of thinking is also highly evident in some
current multicultural discourses, which affirm difference, contingency, and
antifundamentalist pedagogy.
Here again, the very possibility of a postmodem
dialogue among differences and of border crossing overcoming ethnocentrism is
ultimately founded on modern universalistic conceptions of the good (or at
least on a universal pragmatic) and a fundamentalist conception of human nature
and human rights. This is so even when explicitly educational thinkers like
Giroux align themselves with the soft postmodern critique of the Enlightenment
and its fundamentalism, universalism, and transcendentalism.[14] The relation
between peace and human rights and the potential tension between
multiculturalism and humanism is identifiable also in major UNESCO declarations,
where the United Nations' commitment to self-determination and the independence
of states is covered by an explicit, uncompromising commitment to a humanist
conception of universal human rights.
In UNESCO's Medium-Term Plan for 1977-1982 we read that
it "condemns all violations of human rights as a threat and contrary to
its very spirit." The struggle for peace and action to promote human
rights are recognized as inseparable. Their linkage "constitutes a
coherent conceptual framework." UNESCO states in this spirit that
There can be no genuine peace when the most elementary
human rights are violated, or while situations of
injustice continue to exist; conversely, human rights
for all cannot take root and achieve full growth while
latent or open conflicts are rife.... Peace is
incomplete with malnutrition, extreme poverty and the
refusal of the rights of people to self-determination....
The only lasting peace is a just peace based on
respect for human rights. Furthermore, a just peace
calls for the establishment of an equitable
international order, which will preserve future
generations from the scourge of war.[15]
The universalistic conception of human rights in the
modern sense can be traced to the Virginia Bill of Rights and to the 1776
American Declaration of Independence, as well as to the 1789 French
declaration. It can also be traced to Kantian philosophy. Yet all of these were
founded not only on John Locke's and Jean-Jacques Rousseau's conceptions of
natural law, but on a Western traditional fundamentalism within which theories
of natural law and human nature were developed.
Such conceptions are highly problematic in today's
philosophical and political discussions regardless of one's self-positioning.
Postmodernists, modernists, humanists, feminists, postcolonialists, and
multiculturalists, of many stripes, are all committed to challenging the
universalistic and essentialist conception of human rights. They favor
contingency, localism, difference, and uniqueness as the starting point for a
declared non-Western-ethnocentric peace education. Within the various soft
postmodern trends the politics of rights is founded on contingent, fragile,
temporary coalitions of minorities, which represent real, changing interests
and passions, replacing ethnocentric Western universalized concepts such as
human rights.[16] Constituent thinkers of this trend (such as bell hooks, Peter
McLaren, and Elizabeth Ellsworth) do not take part in today's celebrated peace
education even when they are involved in actual communal, ethnic, race, and
gender conflicts.[17] Here I do not address this issue but limit myself to
developing the argument that both Left and Right supporters of peace education
are united in moralizing politics. This objectifies a certain discourse for the
totalization of an order in which there will be no room for an autonomous
subject and free spirit. Harmony, instead, will endure in perpetual
"peace."
Moralizing politics is not too problematic for
conservatives. As displayed by some of the soft postmodern rhetorics of peace
education, it is also a serious challenge for some of the radical critics of
Western metanarratives. It is an issue to be addressed by the critics of the
existing relations between politics and moral philosophy in essentialist terms,
as part of the naturalization of inequalities, marginalization of the Other,
and self-reproduction of the white man's domination and its structural and
direct violence.
Karl Schmidt was quick to challenge the humanist way to
peace under the banners of universal human rights and moralizing politics. He
ridiculed the humanist attempt to legitimize "just wars" in the name
of future peace and present human cosmopolitan rights. Jurgen Habermas
criticizes Schmidt for ultimately justifying all wars and Schmidt is rightly
blameworthy on this point.[18]
More than that, Schmidt along with other proto-Nazi
writers such as Ernst Juenger are to be blamed for aesthetisizing and
moralizing all forms of heroic or effective national violence.[19] But does
Habermas's critique really respond to Schmidt's challenge to the concepts of
just war and world peace as a (justified) violent realization of human rights?
The difference here is between those who think that successful wars are all
justified -- or at least not provable as unjustified -- and those who claim
that only just wars are justified. I do not attempt to establish a postmodern
position according to which there is no way to distinguish Schmidt's critique
from Habermas's defense of humanist universalism in their concepts of the
justification of war and the commitment to peace. I do claim, however, that
from current postmodern critique and from traditional critical theory it is
possible to launch a serious challenge to the concepts of peace and violence
presented within peace education as represented by declared modernists and
postmodernists alike.
Even in the face of the fascist dimensions of Schmidt's
critique it is important to develop some other aspects of his critique by
questioning the concepts of "peace," "violence," and
"education" that are normally taken for granted by peace education
practitioners and theorists. Amazingly, it is Galtung, the positivist theorist
of peace research, who suggests the most advanced questioning of the concepts
of peace and violence within this tradition.[20] His pupils and critics alike
refrained from investing too much energy in the fundamental questions of peace
education.
The lack of conceptualization within the current framework
of peace education has been noted by a number of writers. Gavriel Salomon's
words are highly relevant:
What is peace education? What is the core of peace
education, its defining attributes? What, if anything,
distinguishes its most prototypical instantiations from
other, similar fields? ... Numerous programs are called
"peace education," ranging from violence reduction in
schools to learning about war and peace, and from
democratic education to the cultivation of self-esteem.
Subsuming all of these under the superordinate category
of peace education tends to blur important distinctions,
such as between the kind of peace education that is
carried out in areas of conflict, such as Northern
Ireland, and programs designed for more peaceful
regions. Similarly, too wide a category tends to lump
together programs designed to cultivate a universal
peaceful outlook with programs aimed at promoting a
peaceful disposition toward a particular group, race, or
nation to replace collective sentiments of hatred,
discrimination, and hostility.[21]
While accepting part of Salomon's critique it is worth
observing that this very critique makes indiscriminate use of various and
conflicting ideological and philosophical conceptions of peace education. More
important still is that, like the thinkers whom he criticizes for a lack of
conceptualization, Salomon too treats peace as an unproblematic concept and
does not invest much effort in conceptualizing his own project. True, there is
here a beginning in the direction of providing a general conceptualization of
the field and tackling its major problematics; but following Galtung, Salomon
distinguishes negative and positive peace, adding that "One needs,
perhaps, to distinguish here between peace in the sense of harmony and the
absence of tension and conflict on the individual, micro level, and peace in
the sense of the absence of war, armed conflict, or violence, on the
collective, macro level."[22] Other scholars, such as Betty Reardon,
identify peace with reconciliation, and the prospects for achieving peace with
conflict resolution and education for reflection grounded in shared values.[23]
This trend is also manifested in UNESCO's 1998
declaration on the occasion of World Teachers' Day. Teachers are presented as
peace builders who shape the future within a positivistic conflict-resolution
orientation:
Building the foundations for peace is as much a
challenge for teachers as it is for those who sign peace
treaties. Conflict resolution and the implementation of
peace settlements feature regularly in the news, but
today on World Teachers' Day, we should ask ourselves
how much such peace efforts would achieve without the
unheralded contribution of the world's 50 million peace
teachers? Day after day and year after year, teachers
build the very fabric of peace. They transmit the
knowledge, values, and attitudes, the skills and
behavior which ensure that peace is not just the absence
of conflict but becomes a way of life for all, putting
into daily practice the concept that social justice is
essential to universal and lasting peace.[24]
This positivistic orientation might have a positive
concept of peace, not just a negative one which conceives peace as an absence
of national conflicts, as do Salomon and many other peace education researchers
and practitioners. However, it is important to note that while accepting
Galtung's positive concept of peace and even when relating to the social
context and its structural violence, the UNESCO declaration conceives peace as
an absence of conflict that is to be achieved by solving "social
injustice" through the teaching of conflict resolution skills.[26] This
declaration conceives peace and social justice as positive and desirable, in
contrast to violence and injustice, which are undesirable. According to the
UNESCO's declaration, this is the aim of teachers as educators, what teachers
universally actually do in their daily work.
I claim that the work of the "50 million
teachers" referred to by UNESCO is in fact one of the main mechanisms of
perpetuating violence and injustice. This is not because they are doing such a
poor job, but on the contrary, because around the world teachers, together with
the other manipulations of normalizing education, are doing it so well. The current
human reality must be challenged by critically addressing the fundamentals and
the context of the concept of peace that these teachers are committed to, and
certainly not by a search for new routes for improving their present
"achievements."
Within this trend there is a strong positivistic
conviction that conflict resolution skills are a matter of professional
knowledge and good didactics. There is a belief that these skills,
fundamentally, might be taught along with the quest for justice in the most
concrete and specific manner.[26] Some of the positivist writers within this
trend even see peace education as a successful conflict-solving process in
which the decline of violence is to be detected by a measurable promotion of
schools' efficiency and productivity.[27]
As the UNESCO declaration indicates, not all peace
education researchers and thinkers neglect the social context and the challenge
of actual power relations within which peace education and its rivals are
produced. Hans Ulrich Wintsch, for example, is a peace education thinker who
rejects the conception of positive peace. Wintsch stresses the inevitability of
social conflict and suggests that peace is not merely the absence of conflict,
but entails "learning to live with conflict in a constructive
manner."[28] Within this framework, personal fulfillment is essential for
world peace, or in Lyman Ross's words, "the individual must be helped to
develop his full potential for constructive, peaceful living."[29]
Peace education within the multicultural discourse
emphasizes diversity as a precondition for peace, in contrast to the concept of
reproducing shared values and a homogeneous kind of reflection toward universal
solidarity and responsibility as analyzed by liberal peace educators and theorists
of civil education. Kristi Rennebohm-Franz's statements are paradigmatic in
this context:
With multiple versions of ways of coming to know our
world as well as multiple versions of presenting and
sharing understandings, we begin to weave an educational
tapestry that reveals the complexities, diversities,
commonalties, and interconnectedness of many human
experiences. Understanding multiple versions is the
beginning of learning how to weave a global
multicultural peace tapestry rich in many colors,
textures, and styles.[30]
Freire, Marguerite Rivage-Seul, and many other critical
educational theorists such as McLaren and Giroux tried to give voice and place
to the perspective of the marginalized, to empower those whose voice has been
silenced. Rivage-Seul tries to develop an alternative peace education based not
on hegemonic perspectives and interests but on the contrary, on those of the
silenced, based on Freire's concept of moral imagination which, it is hoped,
will transcend "the bounds of technical thought."[31] However, peace
education within the framework of this traditional Freirerian framework is
universalistic and essentialist, and at bottom conceives hierarchical relations
between teacher and students as a precondition for educational progress.[32]
The writers who are committed to developing the possibility of the oppressed
raising their voice conceive the potential for the universalization of
knowledge and the articulation of the facts as a precondition for an
emancipatory peace education:
Since all human beings are inevitably interrelated on a
limited planet, the pursuit of a material advantage on
the part of some inevitably affects the ability of
others to meet their basic needs. Therefore, persistence
in the cult of the superfluous necessarily violates the
others' basic freedom, understood as the liberty of each
to choose whatever does not endanger the material basis
of the freedom of any other).[33]
This conception of human essence is impossible to
separate from the conception of the possible emancipation manifested in
"peace." Under the influence of Marcuse and the positive utopian
tradition, Rivage-Seul cites Hinklammert to hint in the direction of an
emancipatory, critical, peace education:
Transcendental imagination envisions full human life in
which there-no longer exists a disjunction between
sensual hunger and its equally sensual satisfaction....
It is a question of imagining fullness in which there is
no need for institutions.... There is neither perfect
competition nor planning. It is the spontaneity which
comes from the recognition of all as subjects, and which
is not thinkable except by means of an imagination of a
fluid nature friendly to human beings.[34]
All these diverse conceptions of peace are united in
conceiving peace as desirable, on the one hand, and as a manifestation of the
reduction or complete elimination of violence and the realization of human
potential free and just intersubjectivity, on the other. I think that this
conviction should be challenged.
In Book IV of The City of God against the Pagans, St.
Augustine establishes the sources of peace and violence and articulates their
essence and characters.[35] Since the various trends in current peace education
share the same general concept of peace, which is traceable not only to the
Enlightenment's thought but even to earlier Christian and Greek sources, it is
worth resorting to St. Augustine even if he is not the sole influence or the
earliest. As I will show, while being one of the sources for the concept of
peace dominant in present peace education, the Augustinian concept is much richer
and of more value in the presentation of the concepts of peace and violence in
the postmodern elaboration:
I distinguish two branches of mankind: one made up of
those who live according to man, the other those who
live according to God. I speak of these branches also
allegorically as two cities, that is, two societies of
human beings, of which one is predestined to reign
eternally with God and the other to undergo eternal
punishment with the devil. For at the very start, when
the two cities began their history through birth and
death, the first to be born was the citizen of this
world, and only after him came the alien in this world
who is a member of the city of God, one predestined by
grace and chosen by grace, one by grace an alien below
and by grace a citizen above.[36]
St. Augustine's
framework distinguishes two entities and two histories within which the
separation of peace and violence acquires its full meaning. But for St.
Augustine, contrary to current major trends in peace
education, this is a dialectical historical process. He follows it in
presenting an imperative to transcend history and its violences. I will return
later to this aspect of the division between peace and violence's historical
existence and its transcendence. However, already at this stage it is important
to stress his grounds for the preference of peace: its relation to true belief
in the right way to the redemption of humans and the world.
Here St. Augustine follows the Socratic tradition and
connects redemption to the possibility of transcendence as attaining the light
of the true knowledge.[37] This is one of the preconditions for the totalizing
dimension of Western education and its being swallowed, reproduced, and
re-presented within the hegemonic violences. The present peace education has
lost its theological sources and its theological conceptualizations. It has
also lost its total commitment to the transformation of the human condition
toward its full emancipation.
While speaking in the language of moral politics,
present-day peace education fails to submit noncontingent justifications for
its claims, practices, and hopes for a state of peace that is not a mere
violent/stable political construct. However, it is exactly in the present-day
postmodern condition and in the current globalization process that there is no
room for a serious challenge to the hegemonic claims for knowledge by the totally
other than the present reality or by an alternative, vivid Spirit. Within the
present reality there is no room for a new Moses, Jesus, Buddha, Marx, or
Hitler. The supposed alternative Spirit of Humanism was rapidly domesticated in
the Middle East and even in the Humanistic Iran by the logic of capitalism and
instrumental rationality. Within the present modern and premodern conditions
the otherness of the Other is terrorized while it is proclaimed as evil, sin,
or a dangerous epistemological or dogmatic gift. In the most efficient assaults
currently taking place in today's postmodern arenas such as cyberspace,
otherness is presented and functions as an irrelevant element; it is ironized
or even internalized within the global pleasure machine as a mere meaningless
"link," "site," "item," or "experience"
-- namely, as an ornament or a plaything to be used for a passing moment in a
context where there is no transcendence or escape from meaninglessness.
This anti-humanism and refusal to life that celebrates
anti-transcendentalism, and is committed to contingency, hybridity,
fragmentarization, and eternal empty fluidity is immanently committed to
totalizing information and to purging the threatening gift or
"saving" humanity from its danger by all necessary means. Here
normalizing education, purging the Other of his or her epistemological
otherness, structural violence, and the "direct" individual and
collective violences are inseparable. One of our aims should be to unveil the
relation between the success of these violences and their invisibility --
invisibility because they are sublimated as a manifestation of mental health
and collective stability, order, and peace. We should show how these postmodern
violences constitute an order of things that prevents reflection, resistance,
and transcendence. Within the theological tradition this resistance to the
given reality is conceived as openness to or quest for redemption. Peace is
conceived within this framework as "the return of the multiple to unity,
in conformity with the Platonic or Neoplatonic idea of the one."[38]
It is important to note, however, that for St.
Augustine it is impossible to conceive "the city of God" disconnected
from "the earthly city" -- they are always to be conceived in their
mutual relations. More than that, while real peace is only to be conceived
within the city of God, its rival city strives for peace too. The division is
not only, as in current peace education, between a state of peace and a state
of violence (or conflict), but in parallel also between two essentially
different states of peace. (One could also say, between two different sets of
violences, one secular, the other sacred, yet called "peace.")
The earthly city is in constant "pursuit of
victories that either cut lives short or at any rate are short-lived."[39]
Yet as the manifestation of successful violence, these victories contain also
goods, although only "the lowest kind of goods."[40] Among these
lowest kinds of goods attained by warfare St. Augustine counts earthly peace.
The point that is important for St. Augustine, which is
forgotten by today's peace education, is that (earthly) peace is only
attainable by warfare: "Thus to gain the lowest kind of good it covets an
earthly peace, one that it seeks to attain by warfare; for if it is victorious
and no one remains to resist it, there will be peace."[41] According to
St. Augustine there are higher goods than an earthly peace; these "belong
to the city above, in which victory will be untroubled in everlasting and
ultimate peace."[42] This other kind of peace is totally different from
the peace that is tenable in the earthly city, and it is even conditioned by
transcending the peace that the earthly city and its victories can offer.
On the one hand, St. Augustine represents a Western
philosophical tradition which after being secularized by Kant, Hegel, and Marx
could lead to a kind of universalism within which idealists, pragmatists, and
even (very) soft postmodernists could share peace education.
Within peace education as developed by pragmatists,
feminists, multiculturalists, and certainly by positivistic-oriented
functionalists who strive for social stability and free, prosperous, national
and international markets, all trends relate to human rights and resist direct
and explicit violence in the name of universal rights such as freedom from
persecution or exploitation. Here the division between peace and violence is
clearcut, and the very commitment and quest for peace is left unaddressed and
unproblematized.
St. Augustine, on the other hand, more than these
present peace education theorists and practitioners, seriously addresses the
issue of peace and problematizes the quest for peace in relation to the essence
of the human and humanity's ultimate goal. In Augustinian terms, the ideal and
the reality that peace education strives for is the earthly city in its most
severe form. For St. Augustine this is something unavoidable in this world, yet
it is a challenge that must be overcome in order to be redeemed.
We see St. Augustine's doctrine and the educational
attitude he represents within Western thinking not solely but as a part of a
violent control of Western consciousness and as a manifestation of
epistemological violence against its disciples. At the same time, however, it
is worth acknowledging its dialectics and its transcendental element. It
contains an antagonism to the whole order of which peace as a desire, as an
ideal, and as a reality is but a part. As such it is a constant challenge to
this order, while being part of it, and it contains an important emancipatory
potential. This dimension of challenging the hegemonic realm of self-evidence
and the imperative for overcoming philosophy and existence is surely missing in
the concept of "peace" as it functions in the various trends in
current peace education.
Following St. Augustine I claim that what in the
political arena is called "peace" is actually one of the extreme
manifestations of successful terror. Emmanuel Levinas sees the seed of this
condition already in "Greek wisdom" and pinpoints its violent nature
in which human peace is awaited on the basis of the truth:
Peace on the basis of the truth--on the basis of the
truth of knowledge where, instead of opposing itself,
the diverse agrees with itself and unites; where the
stranger is assimilated.... Peace on the basis of the
truth, which -- marvel of marvels -- commands humans
without forcing them or combating them, which governs
them or gathers them together without enslaving them,
which through discourse, can convince rather than
vanquish.[43]
This totalizing concept of peace in its relation to
true knowledge allows an effective dehumanization of humans and their formation
into collectives. At its peak it makes possible and secures consciousness,
which is committed to "true" solidarity. It creates and generously
awards the willingness of the individual to sacrifice herself for the
collective, its security, ideals, values, and horizons. As such it is part and
parcel of the violence that produces borders, wars, and Others as objects of
education, destruction, redemption, emancipation, or deconstruction. Yet it is
a concept of peace conditioned by an abandonment of reflection and
transcendence. It is a manifestation of one's being swallowed or constructed by
the ruling realm of self-evidence. With the assistance of good parents, devoted
teachers, supportive friends, beautiful texts, and endless other resources, it
produces brave warriors to protect its borders and destroy its internal and
external enemies. As such, it actually manifests human forgetfulness of its
goal: the state of domestication and tranquilization that reflects the victory
of normalizing education. It is peace as "repose among beings well-placed
or reposing on the underlying solidity of their substance, self-sufficient in
their identity or capable of being satisfied and seeking
satisfaction."[44]
This concept of philosophy, which was dominated by the
Platonic quest for light and love of truth, is embarrassed and feels guilty in
current Western thought. It finds it hard to "Recognize itself in its
millennia of fratricidal, political, and bloody struggles, of imperialism, of
human hatred and exploitation, up to our century of world wars, genocides, the
Holocaust, and terrorism; of unemployment, the continuing poverty of the Third
World."[45] Levinas does not explicitly say it but he implies that in
reality a resemblance exists between this quest for the Platonic light and the
violence that governs and constitutes Western reality. Postcolonial thinkers
implement this insight from Levinas and Jacques Derrida in rereading the direct
and symbolic violence and counter-violence between Western colonialism and its
marginalized cultures in the Third World and within the Western realm
itself.[46] Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer showed in a fascinating manner
how this tradition was galvanized and how instrumental rationality is
responsible for the control of nature and the control of human nature, as a
trend which leads to the Holocaust, to Stalinism, as well as to their liberal
alternatives in the form of Western capitalistic-oriented democracies.[47]
The concept of peace that is at the basis of peace
education (in all its different versions), therefore, needs to be seen as part
and parcel of the same reality that it is committed to overcome. As the
critical theory of Adorno and Horkheimer shows, it is much more than what
Levinas calls "an embarrassment" for the West, as if it were a
misfortune that could be overcome within the tradition of instrumental
rationality that made it possible it in the first place. But the critical
theory of Adorno and Horkheimer and the philosophy of Levinas do share an understanding
that it is possible to struggle against the governing violence and the
challenge to the epistemological, cultural, political, and economic misfortunes
afflicting today's individual. This challenge, according to these two
philosophical trends, is to be developed from within the Judeo-Christian
tradition by the pursuit of the option encapsulated as the "wisdom of
Jerusalem," namely, the truth incubated in the Jewish intellectual-moral
tradition. Within their utopian pessimism they present an alternative concept
of peace to the one that is hegemonic in current peace education and the
philosophical frameworks from which it borrows its concepts, strivings, dreams,
and fears. Later I shall return to this alternative conception of peace and
peace education; first I present current oppositions to this kind of
utopianism.
For all their differences, neo-Marxist thinkers such as
Adorno and Horkheimer share with Levinas a common understanding, belief, or
narrative. Within it the autonomous subject is not an empty concept, freedom is
an imperative, knowledge is possible, and responsibility is highly relevant in
challenging the reality in which the absence of peace, or false
"peace," has the upper hand. The Frankfurt School critical theory
also emphasizes the responsibility of the subject to resist the hegemonic realm
of self-evidence. These two philosophies are highly skeptical and ironist, yet
they reject the kind of relativism that made possible most current forms of
postmodern discourses even in their soft versions. However, central figures of
postmodernism are also challenging the philosophical assumptions of current
peace education. Postmodernists such as Michel Foucault, Derrida, Jean-Francois
Lyotard, and Jean Baudrillard, as well as postcolonialists such as Homi Bhabha
and Gayatri Spivak, constitute a considerable challenge to the various naive
humanist concepts of peace education from the Left.
As we have seen, the conceptualization that divides
peace and violence parallels the division between truth and falsity. This
parallel suggests the unification of a theory of peace and a theory of
knowledge. Both theories are based upon a conception of the essence of the
human being and an appropriate ethics. This connection provides the West with a
metaphysical preference for peace and serves as a source of the justifications
of peace education.
The philosophy of Foucault is a serious challenge to
this project. According to Foucault, "one's point of reference should not
be to the great model of language and signs, but to that of war and battle. The
history, which bears and determines us, has the form of war rather than that of
language: relations of power, not relations of meaning."[48] Within the
Foucauldian project, peace education does not differ from any other regime of
truth which produces subjects, knowledge, and values within a history that has
no "meaning." Like all others, this regime too should be subject to
analysis not merely in accordance with good intentions, with "truth,"
or with a natural or sacred "faith in the human" or God, but "in
accordance with the intelligibility of struggles, of strategies and
tactics" without "evading the always open and hazardous reality of
conflict," without "avoiding its violent, bloody and lethal character
by reducing it to the calm Platonic form of language and dialogue."[49]
The concept of peace, which makes possible peace
education as resistance to the various manifestations of national, ethnic,
racial, and gender repression, is seriously challenged by the Foucauldian
project. Here "the understanding of the ways within which power manifests
itself resist the very concept of repression."[50] It denotes the
productivity of power and represents the subject, be it a "victim" or
a "victimizer," as one of the manifestations of contingent,
meaningless, and aimless power relations. In contrast to the traditional
Western concepts of violence, now truth itself "isn't outside
power."[51]
Foucault, like some other postmodernists, deconstructs
the quest for concepts that can support transcendent, orchestrated, essential
change by human autonomy or reason. Traditionally the very possibility of
transcendence made reflection possible. It also allowed a concept of difference
which makes a difference of the kind that "peace" is supposed to be
in relation to "war." People who refuse to accept the omnipotence of
epistemic violence, namely that there is no difference that makes a difference,
he considers naive. Such people find it difficult to acknowledge that
"their history, their economics, their social practices, the language that
they speak, the mythology of their ancestors ... are governed by rules that are
not all given to their consciousness."[52]
Peace education is but one version of normalizing
education. A systematic critical reconstruction of peace education should also
challenge its positive utopianism. Within this positive utopianism in relation
to the stance of "peace," a special role is played by conceptions
that allow hierarchical relations, asymmetries, positive value judgments, and
guarded existential horizons. These are developed and delivered by the ideal
educator, teacher, trainer, mediator, or facilitator. This utopia determines
not only his or her relation to the student but to human communication in more
general terms, within a broader concept of education. This positive utopia
determines the entire set of concepts, yardsticks, and strivings available to
the student. Yet here objects, norms, persons, and events are inseparable from
the struggles between conflicting representation apparatuses and the
metanarratives within which they dwell.
The philosophy and politics of representation, as well
as the life-and-death struggles between narratives and their colonialist
imperatives, and other "dangerous" issues of that kind, are
absolutely foreign to peace education, which is committed to a positive utopia
of undistorted dialogue and uncoerced consensus among adversaries. As such,
peace education cannot reflect on the preconditions for the kind of educational
discourse within which it is positioned, on the violences that it serves. It is
even less competent and ready to challenge "its" violence against its
own otherness.
Within this project various violences of the nameless
kind are untraceable and unchallenged. It is important, however, not to
conceive this situation as mere blindness and passivity; the special
situatedness of peace education can make other violences explicit and addressed
-- it allows their categorization, articulation, and evaluation. The
unreflective consumption and the productive internalization of violences of the
nameless kind allows the transparency of "evil" and the quest for
peace within a stable realm of self-evidence. Yet it is important to note the
productivity of the theoretical limits of peace education. It produces not only
the refusal to problematize the concepts of knowledge, representation,
communication, consensus, intersubjectivity, and the avoidance of treating the
social, cultural, and historical dimensions of the context within which peace
education flourishes; at the same time it also re-produces the dichotomies between
victims and victimizers, good and evil, light and darkness, and ultimately
gives birth to a positive utopia that makes possible the quest for peace and
peace education of the kind of "the earthly city."
Within current peace education, therefore, it is impossible
to problematize the hegemonic concepts of either peace or violence. Nor is this
approach to peace education competent to question the concepts of justice or
injustice and of human subjects and their subjectivity, or to resist the powers
and the apparatuses which produce, re-produce, and destroy collectives,
individuals, their identities, knowledge, skills, perspectives, consciousness,
and contexts. It is no wonder that within peace education there is no
problematization of issues such as the representation of "reality,"
and the Other and his or her otherness, in terms of potential violence,
mistakes, threats, and refusals to acknowledge the true and the just. The
politics of recognition, the politics of representation, and the life-and-death
war raging between and within narratives and truth regimes are unmentioned,
unchallenged, and unaddressed. As a result, there is no reflection, no critical
distance, no realization of their relation to capitalistic globalization, the
world division of work, and the room this makes for naivete and violence of
well-intentioned intellectuals and Western peace activists.
It is wrong to decontextualize peace education and
detach it from globalization and the new world order. I think there is a heavy
human cost to the acceptance of this order as a yardstick and guide for peace
education. This is why it is important to address the reasons for peace
education's disregard for the hegemonic culture industry and its neglect of a
critical perspective for evaluating the reaction to the violences that produce,
reproduce, represent, and consume the present order of things. Peace education
refrains from tackling the fundamentals of the order within which narratives,
armies, merchants, priests, parents, 50 million teachers, establishments,
nations, and ideologies struggle for hegemony -- a hegemony over truth and
justice. This hegemony allows the invisibility of the violence that
manipulates, reconstructs, or destroys rival narratives and the establishments
that they serve and represent.[53]
Peace education in all its versions avoids questioning
life itself and refrains from questioning the positive, constitutive role
violence plays within it. It avoids addressing the status quo as a protection
for and reproduction of an order whose very existence implies the destruction
of other possibilities for life.
The real aim of peace education is revealed as the
fortification of the existing order and the preservation of the invisibility of
hegemonic violence, even when it claims to give voice to the silenced and
challenges the injustice inflicted on the marginalized or the oppressed. The
ultimate yardstick of this concept of peace is the productivity of the existing
symbolic and material order -- even its conceptions of "justice" --
without questioning its own legitimization as a narrative knowledge.[54]
Such epistemic violence is a precondition for the
explicit, unmediated use of violence, which is then granted a name and
addressed as a "conflict" or as "violence."[55] Epistemic
violence is realized in the formation of conceptual apparatuses, knowledge,
consciousness, ideological orientations, and consensus or self-evidence; it is
the aim of normalizing education, in the service of the self-evident and
hegemonic order of things.[56] Epistemic violence plays a part in producing the
subject and her self-evidence, as well as the horizons of her predetermined
consensus.
Without effective educational apparatuses (teachers and
schools are only one element in a much richer arsenal) there will be no room
for the subjectification of the subject (who actually functions as an object)
and the successful delegitimation of other language games and their
subjectifications. In the absence of normalizing education or in the face of
its deconstruction it will be difficult to establish a stable consensus which
will provide a suitable legitimation of the hegemonic narrative and its social
matrix of power. In such a utopian situation it will be impossible to actualize
an effective direct collective violence which is rationalized as a just,
unavoidable, use of force.[57]
The various versions of peace education with their
special relations to the concept of universal human rights share a simplistic
modernist view of consensus, which should be addressed. Some of the peace
education theorists and activists share very naive conceptions regarding the
role of rationality, good intentions, or openness in the meeting with the Other
as sure ways to guarantee a change in attitude to the Other and consensus.[58]
Even in its most advanced forms, for example, the Habermasian project, within
this modernist orientation, the concept of truth is based on the consensus of a
collective universal subject. But the very notions of consensus, truth, or
norms, which are ideally articulated freely and jointly in an undistorted
dialogue, are challenged by postmodernists such as Lyotard in a manner that is
extremely relevant to the rhetoric of peace education. For Lyotard,
Consensus is only a particular state of discussion, not
its end. Its end, on the contrary, is paralogy. This
double observation ... destroys a belief that still
underlies Habermas's research, namely, that humanity as
a collective (universal) subject seeks its common
emancipation through the regularization of the "moves"
permitted in all language games and that the legitimacy
of any statement resides in its contributing to that
emancipation.[59]
Normalizing education is founded on such an
unchallenged consensus and is committed to securing its self-evidence. As part
of its function it is very important for normalizing education to conceal its
foundations and avoid transparency (or secure only a certain kind of critique
and transparency, which is the same thing) of the apparatuses it uses. This is
in order to reproduce the subjectification or the human subject as some-thing
and not as some-one. This process includes the production of his or her
potential violence or productivity and the aims, ideals, interests, and
strivings for love and peace -- as well as more abstract categories such as
"justice." All these enable the subject to function as an agent of
the reproduction of the system. In "peace," the invisibility of
violence, which guarantees the present order, is best secured, the hegemonic
violence is unchallenged, and counter-violence is successfully delegitimated.
In "peace," the subject is efficiently sent off on the quest to
realize her human potential to become other than what she is constructed to be.
In such a "peace" and stable normality, forgetfulness rules and
humans are not ready to be called upon by their destiny.[60] Normalizing
education sets for them the relevant quests, or real dreams, goals, and
enemies, and all the rest is a history of struggling efficiencies -- until
something totally Other intervenes and challenges the hegemonic self-evidence
and the order of things. The constant subjectification of the subject goes on
unchallenged.
The process of subjectification does not relate solely
to individuals. This kind of objectivization and closure is no less present in
the normalization of collectives. Normalizing education cannot reproduce the
horizons of the collective and the closure of its identity without the
enclosure of the Other and her otherness. Yet, as Stuart Hall puts it,
"The unities which identities proclaim are, in fact, constructed within
the play of power and exclusion, and are the result, not of a natural and
inevitable or primordial totality but of the naturalized, overdetermined
process of "closure."[61] This is an implicit critique of the agenda
of peace education and its propositions. It problematizes the concept of
violence, which makes possible the will for preventing "unjust"
violence between and within opponent collectives. It problematizes the hidden
procedure of legitimation and delegitimation and the very possibility of an
unproblematic evaluation and consensus.
It is also important to question the unproblematic
introduction of conflict resolution skills and knowledge. From the postmodern
perspective, these strategies are revealed as one of many conflicting voices
fighting over the position of silencing their Others, in a context of constant
semiotic bombardment. Peace education is unveiled as a position situated in the
narrativization of the individual and collective "self." As such, it
is part and parcel of the conflicting violences competing over hegemony. In
this space, hegemony ensures its own veiling as violence by producing its
justification, or in the case of a final defeat of its rivals by ensuring
totality, closure, sameness, harmonious order, and "peace." In
relation to Levinas's concept of war we can say that in "peace" the
"same does not find again its priority over the other" since the
otherness of the Other has totally vanished.[62] This is where the project of
conflict resolution skills within peace education is situated.
Propagating and bestowing conflict resolution
"skills" is ultimately nothing less than a mode of violence that is
committed to reproducing the present order of things and its ideals. There is
no room here for the totally Other except for the given facts, quests, and
ideological horizons. This failure holds as long as it is instrumental and
effective, yet it is precisely where it is practically most needed that its
impotence is most dramatically manifested. This failure is manifested in the
case of the Israeli/ Palestinian struggle. In not even one of the many peace
education projects in this spot on the globe is there an attempt to challenge
the dialectics of the Israeli Independence Day and its concept of the
Holocaust-Exile-Redemption, or the Palestinian concept of the Nakbah. The
violences of the two representation systems of conflicting memories and their
instrumentalizations within rival ethnocentric collectives are taken for
granted by all of today's peace education projects.[63] Conflict resolution
skills education is threatened even by approaching an issue such as relating to
the national day of triumph or defeat. It fears treating it as part of the
questioning of who "we" are and what is a worthy life or death for
"us." It turns away from questions such as what kind of togetherness
is possible, bearable, or longed-for and what are the ways to approach such a
future -- along with "practical" questions, which are for each of the
parties fundamentally questions worthy of life-and-death-struggle. It refuses
to question the language that should be the language of dialogue and conflict:
What are the starting points, horizons, and aims of the dialogue and the
struggle within which peace education is promoted or rejected?
Research has illuminated the first steps of departing
from the safe ground of "coexistence" projects within the present
order into less restricted and controlled elaborations. It manifests the
structural asymmetry and its violences, which are intent on maintaining Israeli
hegemony within which peace education, "dialogue aimed at peaceful
coexistence," and conflict resolution projects flourish. The moment of departure
from the hegemony of one side dictating the agenda of "peace" for its
Other is also the moment of exposure of what education in conflict-resolution
skills is dedicated to veiling and protecting. Even the most advanced research
on this issue in Israel and Palestine still treats it with positivistic
optimism and speaks of "dilemmas" in realizing ideal coexistence
paradigms in the asymmetrical intercourse within which peace education is
realized.[64]
The current growing Palestinian demand in Israel is to
problematize the status quo and challenge this order and the kind of peace it
longs for. The Israeli hegemonic ideologies and central political powers have
so far refused to question, let alone abolish, the structural violence that
establishes the conditions not only for the systematic oppression of the
Palestinians citizens but also of securing the very existence of the State of
Israel. This trend is not totally disconnected with the hegemonic Palestinian
attitude of denying the legitimacy of any Jewish sovereign existence in Israel,
or Palestine, as they insist on calling it. For the Palestinians' part, peace
education and dialogue should lead, ultimately, to nothing less than regaining
Palestine and the abolition of the Zionist project. Only within this context is
each of the struggling collectives willing to promote projects furthering
conflict resolution skills oriented to achieving a "just peace." This
only shows how education in conflict resolution skills within peace education
takes part in the reproduction of symbolic, mental, economic, cultural, and
political struggles in this arena. It is an arena that hosts many competing
camps contesting for hegemony over representing "reality" as it
really is, reality as it actually should be interpreted, or as it should be
best deconstructed/reconstructed.
Peace education within critical, feminist,
multiculturalist, and ecologically oriented groups is mired in the same
quicksand, even when using functionalist or pragmatic orientations instead of
an idealist or transcendentalist rhetoric. This is so as long as these groups
do not address the challenges presented here.
All this, however, does not mean that we should accept
all of Lyotard's, Foucault's, or Levinas's alternatives. Nor does it imply that
there are no emancipatory dimensions in different versions of peace education
or that there is no difference that makes a difference between the victim and
the victimizer, or nothing to choose between war, general health care,
well-being, poverty, and illiteracy. But it does mean that there is a need to
decipher the material, historical, and political context of normalizing
education and challenging it with a counter-education that will not be anything
other than one more ersion of normalizing education.
If counter-education ought seriously to address
violence and be committed to peace, it should not follow the positive utopia of
peace education and its naive universalistic essentialism. It should address
and overcome its philosophical assumptions and challenge the politics of peace
education while avoiding the kind of universalism and violences it is committed
to overcome. It should avoid, at the same time, reintroducing violence as
"justified" counter-violence. This attempt is embedded in its
negative utopia.
While introducing itself as a utopia, counter-education
cannot find comfort in an abstract negativism that negates the illusions of
consensus among individuals and collectives that are produced to perpetuate
meaninglessness and the productivity of a contingent symbolic economy. It
should not abandon the imperative of transcendence as the human mode of
existence. Its utopia, however, must be a negative utopia. Within it there are
no positive universals such as "justice" or "human rights"
but transcendent negative imperatives for openness such as responding to
injustice and worthy suffering. Within it there is no commitment to universal
"truth" but an infinite responsibility to transcend the fabricated
"truths" and the violences they represent and serve. Within counter-education
there is a rejection even of the universal validity of the pleasure principle;
it represents, instead, the presence of pain and the possibility of
transcending it into worthy suffering. Counter-education offers a need for a
radically different concept of peace and an alternative conception of
education. It means facing apparatuses and practices by which normalizing
education violently fabricates the subject. It resists the subjectification of
the "I": creating the "I" and its self-evidence, its
conceptual apparatus, consciousness, values, and yardsticks not as a
manifestation of his or her human potential, autonomy, and sovereignty -- but
as a manifestation of the omnipotence of the system. This educational violence
is responsible for the unproblematic representation of the "not I" as
the self-evident '"I" and her conceptual, moral, and political
horizons.[65] The human subject, however, while being a product of these
subjectification processes is much more than a mere product of contingent manipulations.
Counter-education should face the changing postmodern
conditions, and within it the questions of responsibility (ethics), life
(ontology), and knowledge (epistemology). Violence in the era of, and within,
cyberspace presents us with additional challenges on the psychic, conceptual,
and political levels. Counter-education should address violence also by
concrete political action. Within this arena the responsibility of the subject,
and the very possibility of a subject and responsibility, are impossible to
conceive in the traditional way. However, violences are not to be understood as
opposed to "real" responsibility. Violences signify irresponsibility
(of the Other) and are to be understood as making possible the violences of
counter-ethics and counter-responsibilities.
The possibility of a nonrepressive consensus, meaning,
and justice needs a brave reconceptualization. Counter-education not only has
no positive utopia; it also looks for a new language that has not yet been
born. This does not mean that it should be silent and passive before the
current reality.
The responsibility of counter-education is not naive.
It acknowledges the importance of deconstructing the naivete and violence of
the quest for challenging injustice and violence. Yet it refuses relativism and
escapism. It is a serious commitment, a responsibility in a godless world where
the logic of capitalism has the upper hand.
The impetus of counter-education springs from the
ethical "I." Yet the responsibility of the ethical "I" has
no words; it is prerational even if it is always historically embedded.
Counter-education acknowledges that an unavoidable rupture deprives the ethical
"I" of the moral "I."[66] There is a rift between the
prerational ethical responsibility toward the Others and the rational/moral
dialogue with the others, which does not negate their otherness. Such a
dialogue is not a given reality, it is a utopia. The utopia of such a dialogue
is a negative utopia, a concrete negative utopia.
Only as concrete negative utopia is the dialogue able
to produce a conversation that is not a contingent manifestation of power
relations and symbolic economies, that merely reflects the omnipotence, and the
whole-presence, of simulacra. Such a negative utopia acknowledges not only
reason, politics, and compromises, but also the presence of power in the
formatted, conceptualized, manipulated, otherness of the Other. This is as far
as its negative dimension is concerned. As a concrete utopia it is present as
an actual potential to be realized, and it is realizable even in microscopic
arenas and for instant hindrances of the continuum. Its historical situatedness
enforces its presence within concrete power relations which it addresses within
its openness to infinity, to the totally other than the given reality.[67]
These power relations governing its context constantly threaten to invade the
dialogue, to cause a perpetual distortion that permits no ideal speech
situation. As such, the dialogue is committed to transcending the realm of
self-evidence and its agencies within the dialogue and its participants. Its
awareness of its conceptual and historical situatedness as well as its
commitment to reflection and to its own transcendence constitutes a central
difference between it and peace education. As such, it cannot avoid being a
concrete praxis.
The realization of negative utopia is the imperative of
counter-education. Even when realized to a certain degree on a specific
occasion it can never offer peace of mind or symmetrical relations. Yet it can
offer sensibility to be called upon by something totally Other, by the Other as
a demand for responsibility, seriousness, and love. One should ask, facing
counter-education, but what about positive manifestations of meaning, truth,
consensus, justice, and peace? Counter-education does not promise such gifts.
These, in their positive form, remain in the hands of peace education and its
rivals.
- Charles F.T. Howlett,
"John Dewey and Nicholas Murray Butler: Contrasting Conceptions of
Peace Education in the Twenties," Educational Theory 37, no. 4 (Fall
1987): 448.
- John Dewey, "Lectures in
China 1919-1920," in John Dewey: Lectures in China, 1919-1920, ed.
Robert W. Clopton and Tsuin-Chen (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press,
1973), 277.
- Johan Galtung, Peace:
Research, Education, Action: Essays in Peace Research I (Copenhagen:
Ejlers, 1975), 262.
- John W. Friesen and Edith
Elizabeth Wieler, "New Robes for an Old Order: Multicultural
Education, Peace Education, Cooperative Learning, and Progressive Education,"
The Journal of Educational Thought 22, no. 1 (April 1988): 50.
- Henry Giroux, Teachers as
Intellectuals: Toward a Critical Pedagogy of Learning (New York: Bergin
and Garvey, 1988), 160.
- Ilan Gur-Ze'ev,
"Modernity, Postmodernity, and Multiculturalism in Israeli
Education," in Modernity, Postrnodernity, and Education, ed. Ilan
Gur-Ze'ev (Tel Aviv: Ramot Tel-Aviv University Press, 1999): 7-50.
- Johan Galtung,
"Violence, Peace, and Peace Research," Journal of Peace Research
6 (1969): 167.
- Ian M. Harris, "Editor's
Introduction," in Peace Education in a Postmodern World, a special
issue of Peabody Journal of Education 71, no. 3 (1996): 1-11.
- Ruth S. Meyers, "Peace
Education: Problems and Promise," Women's Studies Quarterly 12, no. 2
(Summer 1984): 21.
- Brigit Brock-Utne, Educating
for Peace: A Feminist Perspective (New York: Pergamon Press, 1983).
- Marcia L. Johnson,
"Trends in Peace Education," available online at: <http://www.indiana.edu/<sim>ssdc/
pcdig.htm>. Accessed on 15 November 1999.
- Marguerite K. Rivage-Seul,
"Peace Education: Imagination and Pedagogy of the Oppressed,"
Harvard Educational Review 57, no. 2 (May 1987): 157.
- Ilan Gur-Ze'ev, The Frankfurt
School and the History of Pessimism (Jerusalem: Magnes Hebrew University
Press, 1996), in Hebrew.
- Henriette Dahan-Kalev,
"Mizrakhim in Israel: A Postmodern Point of View," in Gur-Ze'ev,
Modernity, Postmodernity, and Education, 197-232.
- UNESCO, "Thinking Ahead
1977," in Brock-Utne, Educating for Peace, 62.
- Linda Alcoff, "Culture
Feminism versus Post-Structuralism," Journal of Women in Culture and
Society 13, no. 31 (1988): 405-35.
- Bell hooks, Feminist Theory:
From Margin to Center (Boston: South End Press, 1984), 126; Peter Mclaren,
Revolutionary Multiculturalism: Pedagogies of Dissent for the New
Millenium (Oxford: Westview Press, 1997): 298; and Elizabeth Ellsworth,
"The Question Remains: How Will You Hold Awareness of the Limits of
Your Knowledge?" Harvard Educational Review 60, nos. 3-4 (1990): 399.
- Jurgen Habermas, "Two
Hundred Years' Hindsight," in Perpetual Peace: Essays on Kant's
Cosmopolitan Ideal, ed. James Bohman and Matthias Lutz-Bachmann
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), 141.
- For Ernst Junger, the brevity
and model example at war and the heroic death in battle became an ideal.
The collective struggle, war itself and for itself, became a supreme
ideal: "being killed for something you believe in -- this is the
greatest realization": even if this sacrifice is founded on error.
This is because, according to Junger, "the thing in itself does not
count at all; the commitment is the reality." According to this view,
"the world and fantasy are one and the same, and even if a man is
killed for a wrong thing, at least he became a hero." Ernst Junger,
Der Kampf als Inneres Erlebnis (Berlin: Mittler, 1929), 5.
- Galtung, "Violence,
Peace, and Peace Research," 110.
- Gavriel Salomon and Baruch
Nevo, "Peace Education: An Active Field in Need for Research,"
paper presented at a Peace Education Conference, University of Haifa, 7-8
November 1999.
- Ibid., 6.
- Betty A. Reardon,
Comprehensive Peace Education: Educating for Global Responsibility (New
York: Teachers College Press, 1988): 69, 72.
- UNESCO, ILO UNDP, and UNICEF
launch a joint message on occasion of World Teachers' Day, October 1998,
available on line at: <http://mirror-us.unesco.org/opi/eng/unescopress/98-209e.htm>.
Accessed 15 September 2001.
- Galtung, Peace: Research,
Education, Action, 29, 251.
- Benjamin Chetkow-Yanoov,
"Conflict-Resolution Skills Can be Taught," in Harris, Peace
Education in a Postmodern World, 12-28.
- Harris, "Editor's
Introduction," 1.
- Friesen and Wieler, "New
Robes for an Old Order," 51.
- Ibid.
- Kristi Rennebohm-Franz,
"Toward a Critical Social Consciousness in Children: Multicultural
Peace Education in a First Grade Classroom," Theory into Practice 35,
no. 4 (Autumn 1996): 266.
- Rivage-Seul, "Peace
Education," 160.
- Ilan Gur-Ze'ev, "Toward
a Nonrepressive Critical Pedagogy," Educational Theory 48, no.
4(1998): 463.
- Rivage-Seul, "Peace
Education," 162.
- Ibid.
- Saint Augustine, The City of
God Against the Pagans (London: W. Heinemann, 1957).
- Ibid., 415.
- Plato "Phaedo," The
Portable Plato (New York: Viking Press, 1950), 201.
- Emmanuel Levinas, "Peace
and Proximity," in Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings,
ed. Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bemasconi
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996): 162.
- St. Augustine, The City of
God, 425.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Ibid., 427.
- Levinas, "Peace and
Proximity," 162.
- Ibid, 163.
- Ibid.
- Ian Chambers, "Waiting
on the End of the World?" in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in
Cultural Studies, ed. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (London: Routledge,
1996), 209.
- Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of
Reason (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974) and Max Horkheimer and
Theodor Adorno, Dialectics of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New
York: Herder and Herder, 1972). *
- Michel Foucault,
Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, ed. and
trans. Colin Gordon (Brighton, Sussex: Harvester Press, 1980).
- Ibid., 115. 50. Ibid., 118.
51. Ibid., 131.
- Michel Foucault, The
Archeology of Knowledge, trans. A. Sheridan Smith (London: Tavistock
Publications, 1995): 210-11.
- Ilan Gur-Ze'ev, Destroying
the Other's Collective Memory (New York: Peter Lang, forthcoming).
- Jean-Francois Lyotard, The
Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Benington and
Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), 27.
- Michel Foucault, Madness and
Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard
Howard (New York: Tavistoc, 1965), 261-62.
- Ilan Gur-Ze'ev, Jan
Masschelein, and Nigel Blake, "Reflectivity, Reflection, and
Counter-education, Studies in Philosophy and Education 20 (2001): 93-106.
- Ilan Gur-Ze'ev, Philosophy,
Politics, and Education in Israel (Haifa: Haifa University Press, 1999),
17. 58. In Salomon and Nevo, "Peace Education."
- Lyotard The Postmodern
Condition, 65-66.
- Dan Bar-On, The Indescribable
and the Undiscussable: Reconstructing Human Discourse After Trauma
(Budapest: Central European University Press, 1999), 261.
- Stuart Hall,
"Introduction: Who Needs Identity?" in Hall and du Gay,
Questions of Cultural Identity, 5.
- Emmanuel Levinas,
"Philosophy and the Idea of Infinity," in Collected
Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: M. Nijhoff, 1987),
51.
- Ilan Gur-Ze'ev, "The
Morality of Acknowledging/not Acknowledging the Other's
Holocaust/Genocide," Journal of Moral Education 27, no. 2 (1998):
161-78.
- Ifat Maoz, "Multiple
Conflicts and Competing Agenda: A Framework for Conceptualizing Structured
Encounters Between Groups in Conflict: The Case of Coexistence Project of
Jews and Palestinians in Israel," Journal of Peace Psychology,
forthcoming.
- Gur-Ze'ev, Masschelein, and
Blake, "Reflectivity, Reflection, and Counter-Education," 103
and Ilan Gur-Ze'ev, "Postmodemism, Values, and Moral Education in
Israel," in Crossroads: Values and Education in Israeli Society, ed.
Yaacov Iram, Samul Scolnicov, Jonathan Cohen, and Elli Schachter
(Jerusalem: Ministry of Education Chief Scientist's Office, 2001), 91-155,
in Hebrew.
- Gur-Ze'ev, Masschelein, and
Blake, "Refiectivity, Reflection, and Counter-education."
- Levinas "Philosophy and
the Idea of Infinity," 47-60.
~~~~~~~~
By Ilan Gur-Ze'ev, Department of Education University
of Haifa
Ilan Gur-ze'ev is Senior Lecturer at the Faculty of
Education, University of Haifa, Israel. His primary areas of scholarship are
critical theory, critical pedagogy, postmodernism, postcolonialism, higher
education, cyberspace, existentialism, Israeli-Palestinian conflict, history of
Western education, history of ideas.
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Source: Educational Theory,
Summer2001, Vol. 51 Issue 3, p315, 21p.
Item Number: 5516676
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