Peace Education

Extract

In this discussion-paper I look at certain general kinds of peace which certain general kinds of “education” are calculated to bring about, if they succeed; in order first to see which if any of them is ultimately worth having. I find at least one, and at present only one general kind of peace to be worth having; and then examine two broad “realistic” ways — the only “realistic” ways I yet see — in which we might think to achieve that peace. I find neither of those ways to be ultimately capable of delivering that peace, and nearly all the more sensible forms of “peace education” which I have yet heard canvassed, to be tacitly or expressly geared to one or other of those ways. (The present paper came in response to a review of literature on peace education which I was called upon to make, some time ago.) I then consider an “unrealistic” possible way to achieving the same sort of supposedly worthwhile peace, finding that the chances of ever achieving it by that way are slender in the extreme, and that the forms of “education” which I see to be needed in order to achieve it by that general route are themselves so dangerous that the “unrealistic” route too may well find no sensible takers.

After a discursive opening I present an argument with “small holes” in it. By that I mean that assumptions would have to be supplied, at various stages, to make the argument even formally valid; and that many of the steps I do express would have to be rewritten for a similar purpose.