Cultivating Children's Morality in China: “Peace” and “War”

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Reexamining Education for Peace: Exploring Educational Practice for Making Kinds of People

Proposal

Peace has always been the goal of education, especially today when the threat of war persists worldwide. However, most of the time, peace has been investigated through the images of war. This research aims to examine how peace is conceptualized in China's national moral education textbooks for elementary school. By analyzing the images and texts of the curriculum, this research unfolds the concept of Peace. I argue that the way peace is conceptualized is strongly tied to the discourse of war: remembering war history, preparing for war, and the potential “enemy”. The good intention of learning from war history, however, also constructs groups of people as targets of hatred, which in turn reinforces the divisions that have been criticized. This research calls for a rethinking of the framework that has been used to discuss "peace” with elementary students and exploring other possibilities of rethinking the relationship between peace and education.

This paper has three sections: it first shows how peace has been conceptualized in the national elementary school textbooks and curriculum standards of moral education in China. Then, it problematizes how this framework conceptualizes “peace” through the preparation for war, which at the same time fabricates “enemy”. Thirdly, it explores the possibility of unfolding the “peace/war” dichotomy through coexistence.

This research engages with multiple conversations of post-foundational studies. Based on Deleuze’s notion of “empty square”(Deleuze, 2004a), it unfolds the notion of “peace” and explores it as a sliding signifier which mobilizes the dichotomy of “Peace/ War”. Drawing on Donna Harwary’s theory of “sympoiesis” (Haraway, 2016) and “becoming-with” (Haraway, 2008), this research argues that it is possible to frame peace beyond the dichotomy of “Peace/War”, exploring further how coexistence could be possible in peace education.

This research examines the national textbooks of moral education, Morality and the Rule of Law (Education, 2011), the latest curriculum standards of Morality and Society (2011), and Morality and the Rule of Law (2022) in China. It analyzes the images and text of the textbooks, examining their relation to the National Curriculum Standards to show how “peace” has been conceptualized and how emotions are fabricated through the textbooks.

This study critically examines how peace is constructed within China’s elementary moral education curriculum. Instead of seeing peace as a neutral or universally shared goal, it reveals how curricular discourses reproduce peace through the perspective of war. By showing how well-meaning narratives of remembering history and preparing for war also foster exclusion and division, the research exposes the hidden paradoxes of peace education. Theoretically, this work challenges the naturalization of the Peace/War dichotomy and creates space for rethinking peace education as practices of coexistence. Methodologically, the study highlights the importance of critical textbook and curriculum analysis for uncovering how emotions, memory, and morality are used in national education efforts. Overall, the research expands international discussions on peace education by demonstrating that peace is not a universal ideal, but a discourse rooted in cultural and political contexts.

Author

• Xue Yin, University of Wisconsin Madison