Dr. Grauer's Column - The Boundaries of Peace Education

The Boundaries of Peace Education: A Girl’s School is Bombed
By Stuart Grauer

Establishing lasting peace is the work of education.

This week we will have to take a break from our usual topics — discovery-based learning, expeditionary education, the small school movement, and leadership — because something else demands our attention.[1]

This week, education news arrived in a dark form. Shajarah Tayyebeh school is/was a small, elementary girls school of around 170 students in a place called Minab, a coastal city of forests, diverse wildlife, and family-centric culture. Students were changing classes when an airstrike impact out of nowhere killed at least 175 people, mostly the students, as it instantly destroyed the school. In no time, rescue workers along with dazed families were searching through rubble scattered with backpacks, books, desks, and colorful fragments of classroom murals. A small arm.

The details continue to unspool. Military explanations sound unclear. Governments will argue, analysts and “influencers” will debate, and history will waste no time generating competing narratives about why.

But before politics, before diplomacy, before military analysis, educators recognize something simpler: A school was hit, and its kids.

For any teacher anywhere in the world, the images are instantly recognizable. The bright walls. The small desks. The daily artifacts of little ones. Schools are spaces originally created to suspend fear and threat— places where every society agrees that children are to be protected while they grow, question, fall, and imagine themselves into a future larger than the conflicts surrounding them. Spaces like that may be the only way out of those conflicts.

International humanitarian law, from the Geneva Conventions and reinforced by global agreements to protect schools, reveals a shared understanding we assume exists, until it is broken: schools are granted special protection. UNESCO expressed this consensus: “The killing of pupils in a place dedicated to learning constitutes a grave violation of the protection afforded to schools under international humanitarian law.” Today, we need to be reminded that the killing of pupils in a place dedicated to learning violates one of civilization’s oldest, most fundamental commitments.

In a way, it makes no difference what country this school is in. When a school anywhere becomes a battlefield, something larger than the building is lost. Every real teacher anywhere understands that schooling is not only about literacy, mathematics, or college preparation. Schools are among the few institutions designed to remain apart from cycles of fear and retaliation. They are innocent. And there is nothing wasteful or impractical about innocence. Inside our classrooms is where young people can learn to listen before reacting, to understand difference without violence, and to imagine coexistence across types and groups. It sounds like bliss, and it can be. In these ways, every school is a part of a long-term peace strategy, the strategy we share with all peoples and regions, whether we set boundaries or not.

Speaking of boundaries, the Minab school stood adjacent to a military installation and may once have been connected to that base before being converted into a school. These details will be debated by analysts. But for a teacher, there is a different debate: what happens when the boundaries between war and schooling dissolve? When classrooms exist within the geography of a conflict, teachers and students inherit and may suddenly face the reality of a teaching and learning challenge far greater than the state curriculum.

Education is in essence peacemaking. US and Iranian scholars have long worked side by side, co-authoring research, mentoring one another’s students, and collaborating in international laboratories—even when their governments stood in deep political conflict. Nobel laureates Shirin Ebadi (Iran) and Jody Williams (USA), co-lead the Nobel Women’s Initiative, a collective effort to promote peace and women's rights globally. In shared universities and global research teams, Americans and Iranians have advanced knowledge together and honored one another through prizes that have no boundaries, from the Fields Medal to international science awards such as the Mustafa Prize. Learning and peace can never be owned by any one nation alone.

The children killed in Minab were obviously not combatants. They were kids like yours and mine, just changing classes in one of the world’s six million schools that day. All of these schools and their students are participants in an unnamed “project” shared by teachers everywhere: from San Diego to Uvalde to Tehran; in Columbine, Newtown and Parkland; in Kyiv, Gaza, and Moscow. Schools are our oldest forces shepherding each new generation into a more sane and educated world. The destruction of a school is not “collateral damage.” It is an unthinkable, shared human failure.

Mournful moments call for real teachers more than any other time. Peace is not just the responsibility that diplomats or governments AI about for better rationale after wars have already begun. Peace is cultivated over a childhood in safe spaces, slow, even if those spaces are underground, hidden, or forbidden, and it is emerging in classrooms long before conflicts begin, or sometimes while they unfold. Spaces where:

Discussion teaches empathy
A history lesson humanizes events or provides role models
Students (including the troubled ones) resolve conflict without humiliation or domination—in concert with their teachers
A school culture is built through behaviors steeped in values we keep talking about

These are not the secondary or feel-good activities of education. They can be its central purposes. Events like this also remind us that the most essential function of education is much older and more urgent, both: preparing human beings to live together without destroying one another. “The hardest hits are yet to come,” says the US Secretary of State, so we can imagine. But I am running out of imagination.

Ultimately, peace education is not a program or curriculum strand. It is the essence of any core value we are in pursuit of—the universal value underlying the universal values, and a small, connected school, in any country, is uniquely positioned to create space for it and to practice it. In the long run, peace may be the most essential curriculum of every teacher, so thank you for pausing with me. I know times like this can feel hopeless, but the work and callings of great teachers have always been towards empathy rather than despair or victimhood. Please take a moment to honor the children and teachers of Shajarah Tayyebeh school, and to reflect on the meaning of “school.”

[1] This break is an extension of a column I wrote a few weeks ago trying to explore something emerging, a shift:  Shadow School: Where Something Is Wrong—but No One Will Say It. But this takes it further.

COMMENT! Click on the "Comments" drop-down box below to share a comment.

SHARE! Click on the social media icons below or copy the link to share this column.