October 07, 2005
Teaching Peace or Teaching a
Teaching Peace or Teaching a Piece of Garbage?
Some time ago, dear reader, a delightful devotee of this humble “weblog” kindly sent along a copy of a book proposal that came to his attention. Upon reviewing the document, we, the crack young staff of “The Hatemonger’s Quarterly,” immediately became violent, shaken by paroxysms of rage.And this made us collectively wonder: Why do so-called peace advocates get us so darn riled up? Perhaps it’s the fact that said “peace advocates” only want one side to cease and desist: The United States, Israel, the West. For some reason, the pugnacity of an Osama bin Laden or a Hamas doesn’t appear to get their dander up. They can fight all they want; we, on the other hand, must stop our warmongering ways.
Anyway, below we have reproduced the aforementioned book proposal, to which we have affixed our own humble commentary. See if this document bothers you half as much as it irked us.
EDUCATORS AS PEACE MAKERS:
TRANSFORMING EDUCATION FOR GLOBAL PEACE
A Book proposal
By
Jing Lin
Christa Bruhn, Ph. D.
INTRODUCTION
Bringing peace education to the center of our attention is no longer an option but a necessity. The Sept 11, 2001 attack on the United States, and wars and conflicts raging in the world today have critically heightened our awareness to our current global peace crises, and we as educators are called up to take actions and work more intensively than ever as peace makers. As Martin Luther King said:
We have been forced to a point where we’re going to have to grapple with the problems that men have been trying to grapple with through history, but the demands didn’t force them to do it. Survival demands that we grapple with them. Men, for years now, have been talking about war and peace. But now, no longer can they just talk about it. It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence in this world; it’s nonviolence or nonexistence (Martin Luther King, “I see the promised land”, April 3, 1968)
Indeed, we are living in a critical juncture in human history. We have built up massive global misunderstandings and engaged in bloody wars and conflicts. We possess the means to destroy the humanity many times over. It is therefore of vital importance to engage educators in the construction of sustainable global peace. Diverse groups of conscientious teachers and scholars have made efforts to integrate peace education into their teaching. However, in general, peace education is still marginalized in our education system. Individual educators feel powerless in face of tremendous social, political, and educational obstacles to make peace education empowering and inspiring for themselves and for others. A united front is yet to be formed, and powerful paradigms that can empower educators to play a critical role in peace building need to be brought forward; we need to form effective strategies to transform education as a powerful force for global peace.
This book project engages educators to explore ways and strategies to conduct effective peace education in all levels of education, to train educators as peace makers, and to transform social forces, the self and others for the construction of global peace. The book aims to provide a new vision that aims at educating new generations of human beings for peace, and to rally all peace-loving forces to embark on a unified endeavor to build long-lasting peace in our world.
We invite you to send in an abstract of 200-250 words for your chapter. We are looking to have 15-20 chapters ranging from 10-20 pages each.
Oh, dear, oh, dear, oh, dear. We have so much to say about this rancid effort at indoctrinating our children into mindless capitulation that we hardly know where to begin.
But we suppose we’ll start with the obvious: Why is it that every jackass who desires the destruction of Western civilization is so quick to proffer a Martin Luther King quotation? We always thought Dr. King’s struggle was a great part of Western civilization, rather than a clarion call for its ruin. Nowadays, it seems any two-bit academic chucklehead uses Dr. King as an opportunity to give his thoughts a sense of moral righteousness. Frankly, we find this disgusting.
But let’s turn to the heart of the matter: These two morons—one of whom, it seems, is a professor at the University of Maryland although without a PhD—earnestly pine to use their classrooms as bully pulpits. As their idiotic book proposal suggests, they want American universities to become propaganda outlets for their own views.
Now, never mind for a moment the fact that these views—cleverly hidden by the rubric of “peace studies”—are foolish and dangerous. This shouldn’t matter much in comparison with the main point: It is destructive to use education as a means to force feed students specific viewpoints, instead of allowing them to think for themselves. In this sense, these two academic buffoons are deeply pernicious characters: They aim at nothing less than the degradation of a liberal arts education.
And then there’s the matter of the specific cause espoused. We, the crack young staff of “The Hatemonger’s Quarterly,” humbly submit that stalwart “peace studies” advocates lack a thoroughgoing knowledge of foreign policy. Our proof? Why, savor Jing Lin’s utterly rebartative description of her contribution to Educators as Peacemakers:
How can we as human beings learn to live together? For decades, with the dominance of a rational positivistic paradigm, we have relegated moral education and peace education to the margin, and have not reflected profoundly on what kind of global ethic we need to develop that would enable us to train future generations to work for and enjoy lasting peace. In this paper, Jing Lin will examine the current discussions on the formation of a global ethic and argue that we need to push the current baseline further. We need a global ethic of universal love, unconditional forgiveness and reconciliation as the basis for honest dialogues and reconnection. Our oneness is an essential concept for envisioning a new world. Peace education, if it is to be exciting and inspiring, needs to elevate us to see what we can become; it has to be an education for wisdom and universal love.
Oh, you have got to be kidding us! A “global ethic of universal love”? We’re sure the thugocracies of North Korea and Iran will really go for that. Gee, world peace sure is simple. Thanks, academia.
