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From
struggling for peace to peace making.
Quite recently our planet was under the danger of the world
nuclear war. But today mankind having overcome this stage
has made its choice towards preserving life on our planet.
But now we are under the threat of the so called
international terrorism and local wars. The former like the
latter as well as any military conflict testifies
to our disability on the part of people, groups of people or
states to settle conflicts by peaceful methods, to
co-operate or to come to agreement. This disability is
characteristic of many people on the Earth but it is
manifested on different levels:
-
Conflicts arise in families between spouses
-
Conflicts arise between parents and children
-
Conflicts arise in working communities
-
Conflicts arise between teachers and students, etc
These general conflicts have given birth to a whole science
called conflictology, which studies the ways of settling
conflicts.
BUT:
wouldn’t the other approach be better: instead of teaching
people to settle conflicts to teach them to live
without conflicts, by means of developing in
them an ability to overcome problems in a peaceful way, an
ability to carry on a dialogue. With such an approach fight
against terrorism will give way to its prevention,
eliminating the very causes of conflicts or military ways of
settling any problems.
And it
is possible! In our opinion it is an efficient
way to transform the whole of mankind into a peaceful
community.
What is
to be done?
-
to
proclaim the following principles on the basis
of which any decisions up to law making are to be taken
as imperatives:
-
Positiveness
-
General responsibility
-
Consulting (consultiveness)
The
first principle will promote taking creative
decisions, the second will provide the
realization of the idea that on the thoughts and actions of
each of us today depend the present and future of anyone
else and everyone else on our planet. We all know the
“butterfly effect”. It can be commented on with the words of
a remarkable philosopher and thinker:
“We are all drops in the same ocean” and “We
are all leaves of the same tree”. This principle is to be
the next step of the globalists’ principle – act locally,
think globally. The third principle means
priority of collective decisions and helps uniting people.
Mankind
on the Earth is but one large family, and each of us must
realize that he or she is its member! Unconditionally! And
this is real. This is something we must aim at.
How to
achieve this?
What is
the process like?
Before we
answer this questions let us single out the two components
of this process: immediate and perspective.
So, we
must immediately:
a)
On behalf
of the participants of this forum ask all
governments to observe the above mentioned three principles
when realizing their functions. Moreover, maximum efforts
should be taken to introduce them into practice on all
levels and in all spheres of social-political life: mass
media, trade unions, youth organizations and the like.
b)
address
all law making institutions with the proposal to include
those principles into constitutions, and into laws on
education in particular.
c)
call for
all educationalists
of the planet to analyze the current contents of education,
methods and principles of organizing the educational
process in all educational institutions from crèches up to
universities and bring them in correspondence with
these principles.
d)
address
all
parents who are their children’s first teachers with the
demand to become aware of their responsibility and to raise
their parents’ competence and apply the three
principles not only in their relations with children
but in reference to themselves. For it is parents who
first and foremost serve their children as role models in
building up their relations with the social structure. And
this process is endless for both children and parents.
The perspective component presumes
providing transition to educational process headed for
peacemaking. Analogues of such education do already exist,
but they are all of local character. It is obligatory that
peace making should become one of the guaranteed outcomes of
education. And it is possible.
The expected result of such process is bringing up a new
generation capable of transforming the negative into the
positive, taking responsible decisions collectively.
Unfortunately, it
ought to be mentioned that in Russia there are but a few
schools where such experience has been achieved, and
thus these are local experiences not only on the scale
of the planet but on the scale of Russia as well. Whereas it
is Russia that needs such experience throughout first and
foremost being a multi-national state with a huge amount of
unsettled problems. We must realize that the wave of
war against terrorism results in the opposite: grown
ups and children are overwhelmed by fear, which is negative
but not positive. Fear increases
personal alertness but not universal responsibility.
Who is to do it?
-
We,
those present here.
-
Teachers, scientists (ethics of the experiments carried
out should not be neglected)
-
Parents (there are many of us on the planet and this is
great potential, which has not found its due use in the
process of peace making)
At that, the last comprise the overwhelming majority, and
it is the result of our work in this aspect that is to bring
about the most noticeable effect, the importance of which
can’t be overestimated. That is why we consider this work to
be the most actual, foreground and pressing. It is the level
on which we could transform that positive local experience
into universal, and it won’t fail to yield its positive
result. Moreover, we have
already got algorithms of activities in this direction:
-
Hopelessness
is to
yield to creativity and inspiration;
-
Passiveness
– to activeness
-
Personal responsibility/irresponsibility – to general responsibility;
-
Speaking teachers
– to speaking pupils;
-
Monologue
– to
dialogue;
-
Solely right answer
– to unity of various opinions;
-
Investigation of a problem
– to investigation of the possibility of
transformation of a problem into a
constructive possibility;
-
Personal point of view
– to readiness to acknowledge the limited nature
of one’s point of view;
-
Depression
under the conditions of instability – to optimism;
-
A
mere satisfaction of ones’ needs – to
transformation and formation of humane needs;;
-
Any
certification of the negative – to
transformation of it in to the positive.
Methods of realizations
In order to carry out perspective as well as
immediate tasks we suggest the method, which has been
probated worldwide, namely in such countries as the USA, the
UK, Belgium, Israel, Finland, Germany, Brazil, the
Netherlands, Italy and many others, the
method of projects. Today it has found wide use in the
sphere of social reforms. No doubt it would be as effective
for positive transformations in education too. Its
effectiveness grows considerably if it is integrated with
another method – the method of developing cooperation.
The essence of it consists in the following: the more
complicated is the task/problem, the higher level/degree of
cooperation is needed to settle it. A striking example of
the effectiveness of this method is set in the sphere of
education by numerous international projects.
This method has been probated by us for 15 years. The
implementation of this method provides direction of the
educational vector towards real involvement of all the
participants of the educational process (children, parents
and teachers) in creating their own lives and social
environment. The mentioned above three principles,
positiveness, general responsibility and consultiveness
should be mainframe in the realization of these methods.
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