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Education for Peace Program
Meeting of Government Experts to Design a
Draft Program of Education for Peace in the Hemisphere
PERMANENT COUNCIL OF THE
ORGANIZATION OF AMERICAN STATES COMMITTEE ON HEMISPHERIC SECURITY
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OEA/Ser.G
CP/CSH-225/99
25 August 1999
Original: Spanish |
EDUCATION FOR
PEACE IN THE HEMISPHERE “TOWARDS A CULTURE OF CONFIDENCE AND
DEMOCRATIC COEXISTENCE”
(Colombia)
PERMANENT MISSION OF COLOMBIA TO
THE ORGANIZATION OF AMERICAN STATES 1609 22ND STREET, N.W. WASHINGTON,
D.C. 20008
No. 997 August 19, 1999
Excellency:
I have the honor to address Your
Excellency regarding resolution AG/RES. 1620 (XXIX-O/99) concerning a
Meeting of Government Experts to design a Program of Education for
Peace in the Hemisphere.
My Government, which offered to
host that meeting, has given some thought to this matter and prepared
a general paper on Education for Peace in the Hemisphere, which it is
my pleasure to enclose with this letter.
Accept, Excellency, renewed
assurance of my highest consideration.
Luis Alfredo Ramos Botero Permanent
Representative
His Excellency Ambassador Flavio
Dario Espinal Permanent Representative of the Dominican Republic to
the Organization of American States Chair of the Organization of
American States Washington, D.C.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
I. BACKGROUND 1
II. THE THEORETICAL CONTEXT OF THE
PROPOSAL 1
A. The cultural dimension 1 B. The
ethical dimension 2 C. The educational dimension 2
III. THE SCENARIOS OF PEACE IN THE
HEMISPHERE 3
IV. SPHERES COVERED BY THE PROPOSAL
3
V. A PROPOSED PROGRAM FOR EDUCATION
IN PEACEFUL CO-EXISTENCE 4
A. Education for the intelligent
settlement of disputes 4 B. Education for the promotion of democratic
values and practices 5 C. Education for the promotion of peace among
States 6
VI. A CONCRETE COMMITMENT TO A
PROGRAM OF EDUCATION FOR PEACE IN THE HEMISPHERE 7
VII. TRANSLATING THE PROPOSAL INTO
PRACTICE 8
I. BACKGROUND
The Initiative for the Education
for Peace program arose from the Regional Conference on Confidence and
Security-Building Measures held in Santiago, Chile, in 1995. To this
end, the Committee on Hemispheric Security was asked to submit to the
Permanent Council a set of general guidelines for an Education for
Peace program within the OAS.
From its origins, therefore, the
initiative has had both an ethical and a political dimension, and has
differed in this way from what it might have been had it originated in
the Organization’s education bodies. The idea responds to one of the
principles of the OAS Charter, in which the member countries dedicate
“the international organization that they have developed to achieve an
order of peace and justice, to promote their solidarity, to strengthen
their collaboration and to defend their sovereignty, their territorial
integrity.”
Steps were taken at the outset to
enlist the cooperation of UNESCO in contributing its expertise in this
field, and this proposal therefore refers to the initiatives taken by
that agency.
The basic criteria underlying this
Working Paper are consistent with the following principles of the OAS
Charter: “The spiritual unity of the continent is based on respect for
the cultural values of the American countries and requires their close
cooperation for the high purposes of civilization,” and “The education
of peoples should be directed toward justice, freedom, and peace.”
II. THE THEORETICAL CONTEXT OF THE
PROPOSAL
A. The cultural dimension
The peoples of the Hemisphere
aspire to live together at ever-higher levels of mutual confidence,
mutual collaboration, progress and equity within the diversity of
their national goals and the variety of cultures that characterize
them. This aspiration, far from being illusory, is fully realizable
and significant steps are already being taken in this direction within
the Hemisphere.
The historic horizon of this
undertaking is not limited to the short or medium terms, but extends
indefinitely into the future, and its content implies ever-greater
levels of dynamism, complexity and diversity.
Its significance thus goes beyond
that of a specific, limited program focussed on security or peaceful
coexistence, and embraces the broad underlying strata of our culture,
in which the seeds of humanity will be refined and new heights of
civilized organization will be conquered.
In this respect, this proposal is
consistent with the thinking of UNESCO, which holds that “formulating
a new paradigm for peace in response to the challenges of rising
social violence is indispensable. What is needed is a Culture of Peace
at the world level.” / Language takes on special importance here, as a
vehicle for articulating and transmitting culture, and as the
“internal language” of individuals, which can either reinforce or
disrupt mutual confidence and peace.
Fostering a language that is
conducive to strengthening relationships of confidence and the
peaceful settlement of disputes has an important formative function
and helps to build a capacity to argue and debate issues relating to
collective morals. Since any language–individual or social–reflects
values, beliefs and attitudes, language must become the point of
departure for making peace a subject of permanent discussion and
ongoing dialogue.
B. The ethical dimension
Peaceful coexistence, both within
and among states, is the product of rules of behavior, usage, custom,
norms, and institutions, in tandem with the shared values that are
rooted within each society and within each person. These rules and
values must be constructed and matured primarily by means of
education, in all its many forms. Among these values or collective
assumptions is the conviction that it is both possible and necessary
to put an end to war, since every day it becomes clearer that war
makes no sense for resolving human conflicts, and any justification
for it, however solid its rationale may seem, is purely ephemeral.
Hence the conviction that
confidence among individuals, groups, cultures, and countries is a
prerequisite for political strategies and mechanisms for mobilizing
societies, and must at the same time be their principle result. This
confidence must be rooted in the “ethos” of such individuals, groups,
cultures, and countries, if they are to live together in peace.
C. The educational dimension
UNESCO has quite rightly declared
that “it is in the minds of men that the defenses of peace must be
constructed” (Founding Charter). It is the mind and the heart that
must be the objective of education from this perspective. Education is
increasingly the key to building peaceful coexistence. And we must
remember that peace, as UNESCO tells us once again, cannot consist
solely of the absence of armed conflict, but rather implies a process
of progress, of justice, of mutual respect among peoples, devoted to
guaranteeing the building of an international society in which each
person can find his own place and can enjoy a fair share of the
intellectual and material resources of the world. /
And yet education is not the only
means for ensuring peace, and its effectiveness in this respect is not
absolute. Nor does every kind of education lead directly to peace. It
is clear that other spheres must also be enlisted, such as politics
and economics, and certain social sectors, if this value is to
prevail, and if the right to education is to be enjoyed with the
required degree of coverage and equity. The absence of peace is still
linked to “such secular and as yet unsolved problems as poverty
(which) have been joined by the emergence or intensification of drug
trafficking, corruption, terrorism, organized crime, deteriorating
public safety, among others,” / democratic instability, human rights
violations, all of which are concrete problems that demand urgent
solutions.
III. THE SCENARIOS FOR PEACE IN THE
HEMISPHERE
The internal and external situation
of countries in the Hemisphere, with respect to peace, make up a
variety of scenarios, ranging from social orders in which differences
are resolved without resort to arms, to situations of war in which
respect for International Humanitarian Law must be intensified and
neutral ground established in which opportunities for reconciliation
can be created, and they include situations in which hostilities have
recently ceased and the process of reconciliation has begun.
Education will have a different
role to play in each of these situations, which means that any
proposal relating to education for peace must identity the particular
scenario in each region or country, and that other regions and
countries must understand and be supportive of the respective
processes.
There are also transverse areas of
conflict that affect the entire Hemisphere, or a large number of its
countries, and that must be confronted through a joint educational
effort–although with due regard to the specific features of each
region. These are conflicts related to respect for human rights,
particularly those of children, and to conditions of extreme poverty,
ethnic pluralism, drug trafficking and corruption, as well as the
processes of organizing and mobilizing civil society and efforts to
encourage citizen participation.
IV. AREAS COVERED BY THE PROPOSAL
A proposal such as this one must of
course make itself felt at the level of the individual (in both its
axiological and its moral dimension) but also at the level of the
family, in which people become inured to various forms of violence,
and at that of social groups (such as those that generate
multi-ethnicity) living in various territories, among whom there are a
number of powers in conflict. / Human movements and migrations now
underway in many regions are giving rise to new scenarios and cultural
situations that must be recognized and addressed.
To reach these levels, there will
be a need for formal educational strategies, of course, but also for
non-formal and informal strategies.
V. A PROPOSED PROGRAM FOR EDUCATION
IN PEACEFUL COEXISTENCE
To develop these criteria, we
propose three substantive areas of the program: education for
promoting peace among states, education for promoting democratic
values and practices, and education for the peaceful settlement of
disputes. Consistent with the primacy accorded to the ethical
dimension (fostering confidence, which is more intimately related to
the nature of education) over the political dimension (security), the
areas are presented in the reverse order to that indicated.
A. Education for the intelligent
settlement of disputes
Consistent with the theoretical
dimensions discussed above, it may be stated that armed confrontation
is only one of the alternatives for resolving disputes. It is indeed
the least intelligent, the least mature, and the most costly, and is
frequently fomented by outside agents who know or care nothing for the
real human aspirations of regional or national communities. This
points to the need to distinguish clearly between the category of
conflicts and the ways in which they are resolved.
Conflict is inherent to human and
social dynamics and, in general, may be said to have a positive,
rather than a negative, connotation, since it offers an opportunity to
develop creativity or to foster personal, social, and international
maturity, in the search for higher and better forms of organization.
In the end, the most intelligent conflicts will demand the most
intelligent forms of resolution. Societies that are progressing need
intelligent conflicts.
From this viewpoint, we must
educate our new generations so that they can learn to take advantage
of the wealth of diversity and of conflicts and to appreciate them so
that it becomes clear what a waste it is to resort to arms and war. /
Yet at the same time, they must learn to examine such conflicts
closely and to direct their actions at the real roots of these
conflicts, while fostering criticism and dialogue, and to be
resourceful in the face of the uncertainty that necessarily surrounds
the dynamics of our ever more complex societies. As well, they must be
trained to deal with various contingencies.
This undertaking means that
education must bring about profound changes in the way these new
generations think and interrelate among themselves. Note should be
made here of UNESCO’s call for instilling a sense of “discovering
others” and an attitude of dedication to common objectives. /
Experience shows us that in this
task of taking constructive advantage of individual, cultural, ethnic,
or religious pluralism, among individuals, local communities or
states, the effort to build confidence among them is more an issue for
humanity in general than the preserve of the so-called “knowledge
societies,” / and one that is developed more through education that is
based on the principles of “learning by doing” and “learning through
deliberation” than through strictly academic pursuits. In this field
the pedagogical power of social interaction is more important than
that of formal schooling. A program of education for peace requires,
then, that we retrieve and highlight peace-building experience from
everyday life.
Education for the intelligent
handling of disputes implies being aware of differences, and
respecting them, valuing them, and celebrating them.
B. Education for the promotion of
democratic values and practices
Education, both in the intelligent
handling of disputes and in promoting democratic values and practices,
falls within the field of ethics and requires the construction of a
new cultural “ethos”: it is essential to "mobilize the power of
culture." /
With respect to democracy, the
various states of the Hemisphere today stand at varying degrees of
proximity to a desirable level of participatory democracy. Those
degrees of proximity or distance are measured by a variety of factors,
such as respect for the right to education (and within this, to
instruction in citizenship and political culture), degrees of
inequality or exclusion, and corruption (both within the state and
beyond it) and the many ways in which trans- or supranational powers
interfere.
In this area, a true commitment to
education must be aimed at building a democratic cultural ethos on the
basis of local experiments in citizen participation that will
highlight human dignity and the singularity of individuals and their
primary groupings, and will promote an autonomous intra and
inter-subjective language that fosters responsibility and partnership.
This ethos must be articulated with
the particular cultural callings of the different regions and
countries. We must give a voice to these callings, which are rooted in
a given territory and in an equally specific history that provides a
basis for the agenda of the communities subject of these callings and
their local and regional conflicts. The challenge of education in this
case lies in consolidating the "national identity" of each state as
well as a "hemispheric identity," while maintaining respect for and
fostering this cultural diversity, / i.e., in restoring meaning and
structure to the social fabric, which in turn will allow the true
exercise of the liberties and rights enshrined in national
constitutions and in the Charter of the United Nations. /
The educational commitment, then,
must be aimed at building a viable ethical base within this rich
anthropological spectrum. To this end, while we must promote
recognition and appreciation of our common habitat, and of the
potential of the Hemisphere's cultural wealth and of the common and
interdependent future that awaits us, we must also cultivate a
capacity to seek minimum levels of agreement for coexistence in the
midst of the plurality that necessarily characterizes us. For this,
educational strategies again must cultivate the argumentative power of
language and the richness of its communicative potential.
Education alone cannot generate
confidence or ensure that democracy will prevail, but without
education it is certain that these goals will remain unfulfilled.
Coexistence is a natural phenomenon, while democracy is the result of
cultural construction and as such is learnable.
C. Education for promoting peace
among states
The spirit of this proposal is
clearly positive, since it is based on developing confidence among the
nations of the Hemisphere, and is consistent with the objectives of
the OAS Charter, "to prevent possible causes of difficulties and to
ensure the pacific settlement of disputes that may arise among the
Member States; to promote, by cooperative action, their economic,
social and cultural development" (cf. Article 2 of the Charter).
To put this proposal into effect,
education will have to promote a conviction among the younger
generations that war is no longer an alternative to political
management but is rather its enemy, a cultural invention that can be
overcome through intelligent decisions by governments.
Within the possibilities of
mediation that education offers in this respect (again limited, since
other centers of power are involved, frequently with greater impact),
one task that must be addressed is that of providing instruction in
the continuity and interaction that must exist between ethics and
politics, as well as training for interaction and cooperation between
civil society and the State, within the concept of intelligent
settlement of disputes, and by means of significant experimentation.
Another task, still within the
ethical area, is that of instructing the new generations in the
institutional handling of conflicts (i.e., making visible the power of
law), which calls for giving them a deeper understanding of the value
and importance of this rule for personal and community life and the
harmful nature of cultural alienation, as well as the necessary
correlation between rights and duties, the development and promotion
of which have not always kept pace.
The programs and processes of
inter-regional and interstate integration and cooperation, not only in
the economic but in the social and cultural fields, will surely
facilitate mutual recognition of the wealth to be found within our
cultural and social diversity, the plurality of “ethos” that we
possess, the diversity of situations, mentalities, human realities,
and dreams of our everyday life. In this way, such programs and
processes constitute one of the best educational strategies for
preventing the outbreak of war since, as noted above, "wars are born
in the minds of men" (UNESCO charter), and are frequently organized
and conducted under the guise of abstract rationalizations that allow
no opportunity to consider the concrete, local conflicts of human
development, on which they wreak irreparable destruction.
VI. A CONCRETE COMMITMENT TO A
PROGRAM OF EDUCATION FOR PEACE IN THE HEMISPHERE
After fifty years of the
Organization's existence, and on the threshold of a new millennium,
society today has hemispheric and international potentialities that
should allow the OAS to challenge its member states to new and
ambitious goals in the areas proposed.
Among these potentialities we may
highlight the key role assigned to education in the new century, the
knowledge revolution that has occurred during the century now ending;
the level of universal and hemispheric consciousness that mankind has
achieved, the awareness of human rights and the value of democracy, a
recognition of the value of ethnic and cultural diversity, and
advances in pedagogical know-how and the new cognitive sciences, the
opportunities offered by computerization, and an understanding of the
risks that are inherent when science, politics, and economics are
divorced from ethics.
To these we may add the efforts
that organizations such as UNESCO are making on behalf of a culture of
peace, as well as the coincidence that has become apparent over the
last decade among the various agendas of countries of the Hemisphere
with respect to the intentions of this proposal, which nonetheless
have seldom progressed beyond the stage of words to that of action.
All of these and other
potentialities that characterize human beings in this century mean
that the Organization of American States can now pose to its member
states the challenge of providing training, in an initial stage, for a
generation of hemispheric students, within the guidelines and purposes
mentioned in this proposal. Guidelines that will lead to the building
of a culture of peace, as defined by the UNESCO General Conference
1995: "in the closing days of the 20th-century, the principal
challenge is to begin the transition from a culture of war to a
culture of peace: a culture of social harmony and of sharing, based on
the principles of liberty, justice and democracy, of tolerance and
solidarity, a culture that rejects violence and seeks to prevent the
causes of conflicts at their roots and to resolve problems through
dialogue and negotiation, a culture that guarantees to all people the
full exercise of human rights and the means to participate fully in
the endogenous development of their society." /
The evaluation to be made at the
end of this period will allow us to deepen these convictions or else
to supplant them, but we will by then have the invaluable legacy of a
concrete effort undertaken within a hemispheric partnership,
representing a particularly significant experiment.
VII. TRANSLATING THE PROPOSAL INTO
PRACTICE
Translating this proposal into
practice may take a number of forms in the area of teaching, research,
institutional cooperation, academic and information networks, and can
involve a variety of programs, as long as they retain the thrust of
the broad guidelines proposed for these areas of work and can avoid
reducing them to transitory or strictly local activities.
Among the most important agents for
translating the Education for Peace in the Hemisphere Program into
practice, particular responsibility falls upon ministries of
education, culture, communications or their equivalents, and upon the
universities, since as UNESCO has stated, "university participation in
creating and maintaining that new paradigm, in promoting a culture of
peace, can be a critical component." / "Institutions of higher
education,” it adds, “working together with other organizations, have
an unprecedented opportunity to foster teaching and research in the
service of a culture of peace." /
The success of this program will
depend on international coordination efforts designed to carry out the
program and on regional coordinators (one for each sub region of the
Hemisphere) who, consistent with the characteristics of the various
countries and in coordination with other OAS programs and those of
UNESCO, will promote the program and manage the development of the
various initiatives to be formulated.
Such management will call for
regional meetings of experts to conduct periodic evaluations of
progress under the program, and to propose new alternatives for
carrying it further.
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