School of Education  NEWS Release

PEACE EDUCATION INITIATIVE WITH ISRAEL
BEING ORGANIZED BY UNCG PROFESSOR

Dr. Svi Shapiro

GREENSBORO—As the crisis in the Middle East continues, Dr. Svi Shapiro hopes that educators can be effective as peacemakers.

Shapiro, a professor of education at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, is organizing the American side of an international workshop to explore initiatives in peace education. The event will be held next spring in Haifa, Israel, the country’s third largest city which is located only an hour or two from the strife-torn West Bank.

He has just returned from a week in Israel, and he hopes that people in the conflict-ridden region will give peace education a chance.

Peace education is a relatively new concept, which focuses on using the classroom to work with younger generations in addressing violence, intercultural and multicultural issues and religious differences. Shapiro and his colleagues hope to devise strategies and educational experiences that can impart tolerance, appreciation of diversity and conflict resolution and avoidance to the current and future generations of Israeli and Palestinian children.

“Peace education is significant when you have generations of people who have had to grow up in a culture and an atmosphere where violence is an accepted part of life,” said Shapiro. “It’s not just a matter of bringing about a political settlement, although that is crucial to the peace process. It’s about eliminating attitudes, like the acceptance of violence, that have become imbedded in a society.”

The concept may fly no further than a dove past a tree full of hawks, but the North Carolina-Israel Partnership is providing approximately $45,000 in funding and the plans are going forward. The workshop will be conducted in Israel at the newly established Center for Research on Peace Education, located at the University of Haifa.

While in Israel, Shapiro discussed the upcoming workshop with his colleagues, Dr. Gavriel Salomon and Dr. Baruch Nevo, who are co-directors of the center. “The conference is definitely going on, but the mood in Israel is very grim right now,” he reported. “It’s especially grim, almost despairing, for those who work on behalf of issues of coexistence, dialogue and peace. We all know, however, that this is not the first time this (conflict) has erupted, and it probably won’t be the last.”

Sitting in his office at UNCG, Shapiro is half a world away from the trouble his project will address. He watches the television accounts that show the ebb and flow of the conflict, the diplomatic efforts to draw the leaders back to the peace table and the growing body count on both the Israeli and Palestinian sides. “Optimism,” he admits, may be too hopeful a word when addressing the conflict through an educational program.

“Education is called on to do a lot of different things today,” Shapiro explained. “But we are increasingly aware that education needs to address those kinds of moral, political and social issues that determine how children grow up in a society and whether they have ways of dealing with cultural differences outside of conflict.

“The workshop is looking to the future and to working with young people. After all, they are the future and will ultimately have to take control and determine the kind of world they will live in. We will be looking at ways that education could address conflict in that region. And this won’t be an easy task. It’s not easy trying to bring young people together when violence and conflict are easily visible in their daily lives.”

The project will bring educators together from nations that have broad cultural diversity and which have experienced internal conflict. In addition to Israel, North Carolina and other states, participants will be invited from Poland, Macedonia, Hungary, the Palestinian Authority, South Africa, Belgium, Northern Ireland, Croatia and Rwanda. Among other issues, the group will focus on co-existence and tolerance education, drawing examples from relevant and successful programs that work in other countries.

“We’ll be approaching this work from a perspective of putting theory into practice,” said Shapiro. “We want to know how you can create experiences for students and teachers that help change their attitudes and values.

“As a concept, peace education has a strong moral and spiritual component. It has to do with educating people, especially young people, to be able to see ‘the other’—the enemy—as human beings whose lives have value. “
As a result of the conference, Shapiro hopes that a permanent resource center for public schools in North Carolina might be established jointly with the University of Haifa to offer education ideas, curricula and speakers to deal with issues of diversity and violence prevention.

North Carolina and Israel have similarities, Shapiro said, because both are experiencing multiculturalism and its byproducts: intercultural tensions and misunderstanding. The state, however, is an ideal location from which the initiative can grow. While there is no constantly simmering conflict, the state now has broad cultural and ethnic diversity in its population. Greensboro is nationally recognized as the site of the “Woolworth sit-ins,” and has a historical connection to the peaceful resolution of civil conflict Shapiro said.

The project, with its $45,000 budget, is a modest—but very important--initiative, Shapiro says. In its limited way, can it help ease a conflict that has been going on for more than half a century?

“I have no doubt that there will always be people struggling with this conflict,” said Shapiro. “All I can say is that you do the best you can, and that doing nothing is not an option. There are no guarantees, but we’ve all heard that ‘Blessed are the peacemakers.’ We’re just hoping that this program will bear fruit.”

A faculty member at UNCG since 1979, Shapiro teaches social foundations of education. He served as chair of the Department of Educational Leadership and Cultural Foundations from 1991-97. He is author of the book, "Between Capitalism and Democracy: Educational Policy and the Crisis of the Welfare State," and co-author, with colleague Dr. David Purpel, of “Beyond Liberation and Excellence: Reconstructing the Public Discourse on Education.”

Shapiro is co-editor of the essay collection, "Critical Social Issues in Education: Towards the 21st Century." He was a participant in the White House Conference on Character Education. He writes on educational issues for the magazine, Tikkun. A graduate of the University of London, he holds a master's degree from the University of Pennsylvania and the Ed.D. from Boston University.

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