Rethinking Schooling for the 21st Century

e sincere and deeply felt. But when the neighbours in question see themselves
as possessing even stronger claims to victimhood at the hands of today’s selfappointed
peacemongers (or their grandparents), this approach can become
self-defeating. Rather than promoting international brotherhood and harmony,
it can exacerbate and ossify mutual alienation and incomprehension — as
illustrated in Chapter 3 on East Asia. A thoroughgoing pacifism means removing
the nationalist blinkers, and acknowledging the capacity for aggression and
atrocity that lurks within every culture, society and individual.
As a concept, peace is wedged between sustainability and global citizenship. The
successful pursuit of these objectives depends on the presence of peace, making
the role of schooling in securing peace absolutely pivotal. Several meanings and
approaches can be recognised in the emergent discourse of peace education
(Bajaj and Hantzopoulos, 2016), but in its fullest sense it is about more than
preventing antagonism from spilling over into conflict by reminding us of the
dangers of war — important though this is. Securing ‘sustainable’ peace requires
tackling head-on the chauvinist attitudes that fuel antagonism, dehumanising
the ‘other’. Here the potential of schooling, for better and for worse, is enormous.
Many regions of Asia, as well as the Middle East and parts of Europe, have
experienced heightened levels of insecurity, uncertainty and violence since
the end of the Cold War, manifested not least in an upsurge in terrorism
(Franklin, 2006). The search for peace through education conducted by eminent
philosophers and educationalists during the inter-war years of the last century
— including Bertrand Russell, Maria Montessori and Rabindranath Tagore — is
thus no less urgent today (Brehony, 2004). These thinkers argued for a radical
transformation of schooling as a means of mitigating fear of war and its
consequences. They proposed ideas of ‘world citizenship’ which prefigure the
‘global citizenship’ championed today by UNESCO.
The globally respected expert on early childhood education, Maria Montessori,
was particularly eloquent and inspiring on this score. Her analysis of peace
addressed the psychological terrain of adult-child relations, focusing especially
on the implications for pedagogy. In her lecture ‘Education and Peace’
(Montessori, 1948/1972), she demonstrated how curricula and pedagogy that
ignore the child’s own nature tend to breed servitude of the mind. She argued
that this ultimately serves to perpetuate violence and war, and to maintain the
illusion that war in itself offers the ultimate resolution of conflict. Her analysis
underlines the importance of child-centred education to fostering attitudes and
capabilities that are crucial to the maintenance of peace and the achievement of
sustainability.
Just as in Montessori’s day, clarity as to precisely what constitutes ‘childcentredness’
in schooling remains somewhat elusive. Calls for greater ‘childcentredness’
risk being seen as naïve, fundamentalist pleas for pedagogic
progressivism. However, as our data show, this has not prevented governments
214
Conclusions and Ways Forward