No politician wants war—just ask them. Yet, we structure our society such that pretty much our only response to conflict is war: we build gigantic military machines, we have war colleges, entire institutions to teaching war and, when it comes down to it, we don’t even know how to begin to address conflict without war. You have only hammers, and the whole world is nails; you always prepare for war, you get war.
So it’s good to receive this press release from SMU today:
This Friday, 15 students from Saint Mary’s University will be at Oxford School in Halifax to give students practical conflict resolution skills aimed at addressing issues of mistreatment at school.
The Saint Mary’s students will lead conflict resolution workshops to help Oxford students become Student Ambassadors who have the skills to address issues of mistreatment.The underlying rationale for the project is that so much of the mistreatment that happens in school happens in places where adults are not present.
The initiative is being coordinated by the Saint Mary’s University Conflict Resolution Society, in collaboration with Peaceful Schools International, an organization dedicated to the development and implementation of conflict resolution skills and programs within more than 250 schools locally, regionally, nationally and internationally in 13 countries.
This is a very small deal, of course, but teaching conflict resolution skills to kids is a beginning.
There are other sorts of conflict resolution strategies that can be scaled up to even the international level. Peace groups regularly teach nonviolence strategies, which are not simply “roll over and take it” courses, but rather include an exhaustive self-examination of goals and purpose, and how to create a plan of action that engages an adversary—even a violent, unwilling adversary—in a process that results in mutual satisfaction. That most readers won’t even understand these words demonstrates how alien such strategies are to our society.
Time to start teaching nonviolence.
This article appears in Nov 6-12, 2008.