Overview: Curriculum of Love, Justice, and Peace

• In Event: 41.019 - Curriculum of Love, Justice, and Peace? Genocide of Education? Cross-Cultural Dialogue

Abstract

The panelist will provide a portrayal of the oppressive and genocidal landscape of education and engage a cross-cultural dialogue on curriculum of love, justice, and peace. He will illustrate that currently mass-media scream alerts about killing and destruction wrought by humans on humans, on myriad non-human species, and on the inanimate environment. Such acts of terrorism, hatred, and brutality are unspeakably horrible for families and friends of the deceased. In the same light, murder and oppression by conquerors who hold power in corporate states are seldom reported. Those who are abused, harassed, and murdered by conquerors who have made laws to protect and advance themselves and their properties are deemed illegal and they are brought to justice, meaning killed or imprisoned. Those who fight and kill for the conquerors are given high honors, praised, and then often neglected since their purpose of conquest has been fulfilled.

The vast majority of world citizens, today and throughout history, fit Frantz Fanon’s (1961) indictment in The Wretched of the Earth. This has been the case from the ancient civilizations of Egypt, Sumer, China, India, Persia, Greece, Rome, Byzantium, through the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Hosts of little known civilizations, from regions of Africa, Latin America, pre-Columbian North America, islands cultures to the empires of Spain, Portugal, Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Russia, and the United States, doubtless fit the pattern. All were formed by conquerors. All defined education as schooling that perpetuates their domination and develops curriculum to make children perpetuate what conquerors need to maintain power over peons. Conservative estimates of genocide, murder, and mayhem through conqueror legitimated engagement in predatory action and tyranny are in the millions upon millions.

Significance resides in assuming that curriculum in the present and future requires a deep and relational understanding of how diverse publics educate from the bottom up to provide curricula of love, justice, and peace. It provides precedent of such curricular ventures by oppressed persons throughout the world who have overcome or evaded projects of conquest. Lives and works of such 19th and 20th Century educators~activists~scholars such as Anna Julia Cooper (1868-1964), John Dewey (1859-1952), Jane Addams (1860-1935), Carter G. Woodson (1875-1950), Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965), Helen Keller (1880-1968), Septima Clark (1898-1987), Paulo Freire (1921-1997), and Fred Rogers (1928-2003) will be brought into the dialogue. Obviously, the search for curricula of love, justice and peace has been at least a minor portion of discussions of education that hearken back to ideas and practices of founders of the world’s great religions, e.g., Laoze (6th-5th Century BCE – 531 BCE), Gautama Buddha (563-483 BCE), Confucius (551-479 BCE), Jesus Christ (0-33), and Muhammad (570-632).

Author

• William (Bill) H. Schubert, University of Illinois at Chicago