There is nothing inherently wrong with conflict. It is an essential creative element in human relations; a means to change and develop our values, ethics, welfare, justice, and society. The wrong is in our way of dealing with conflict and how we use conflict to dominate other persons or to discriminate against them for their race, religion or opinions.

It is time for the world to revise school curricula to include peace education and intercultural relations in schoolbooks as a way to reduce discrimination against minorities and the suffering of our children in the future. It is time to re-think our interpretations of our religion context and to stop using them to justify war and violence. Education for peace is the means to change the future from a culture of violence to a culture of nonviolence. One way to ensure that is to include peace education in our formal and non-formal educational programs in the form of human rights, democracy, nonviolence, conflict resolution and justice.

People working for peace should have diverse roots. They should look beyond their cultural boundaries and take a holistic view of humankind. Researchers, peace activists, pacifists and educators should go further than just defining peace as the absence of war. The definition of peace should include cooperation, justice and reconciliation; peace between individuals, groups, nations, states and global peace; peace which is achieved by nonviolent means and not by aircraft, artillery or nuclear weapons.

Peace and conflict resolution are very important subjects for our children to learn and schools have a key responsibility in leading them towards new hope. Children reflect what they read in schoolbooks and mirror their teachers by observing their behavior and their ways of dealing with conflict. If teachers use physical punishment or prevent students from expressing themselves or giving their opinions, children will do the same with their friends or younger fellows. So the first target should be the classroom curriculum, teachers, school principals and supervisors. Before we educate children we should educate ourselves, not only on how to deal with conflict after it happens, but also on how to avoid it at different levels: interpersonal, intra-personal, inter-community, intra-community, and international. Most of these conflicts contain personal and cultural aspects that could be avoided if the educational system prepared students by teaching ethics, values, communication skills and how to respect other cultures and races.

From workshops held for Palestinian teachers, we found that students and teachers are constantly living with interpersonal conflict, which makes them insecure to talk about it. If we add to that the difficult economic, political, and cultural discrimination by the Israeli occupation, we can imagine the need to create a safe situation where they can talk about their suffering to then enable them to change it. If teachers do not feel secure and are not allowed to talk freely to the school principal and, in turn, the principal is not allowed to talk to the director, how can they teach children about the right to speak and to be different? If teachers use physical punishment, how can they tell children not to beat up fellow students? One of the most important items in peace education is to create a safe atmosphere for teachers and students, without the threat of job loss for teachers.


We have done training for teachers, with voluntary participation, amounting to 56 hours throughout the academic year. The next step is to use the experience of these teachers in training other teachers and students. During the program, we found that many teachers felt unable to communicate freely between themselves or with their director, because they don't have time, they are not sure that they will be understood or they are afraid to lose their jobs. I think there is a great need to listen to each other and try to understand other people’s concerns. This can be done by informal meetings between teachers, students and parents, in organized workshops and in social activities. We found that these meetings are very effective in changing the relation between students and teachers, and increase children’s positive behaviours. Meetings between parents, teachers and students together in open dialogue with mutual respect are the best way to impact the culture of peace in schools.