Peace Education, Not Patriotic Education
The President’s call to “restore patriotic education in our schools” via the creation of the “1776 Commission” aimed at controlling public school curricula once again set off my alarm bells. As a dual German-American citizen, I grew up in Germany and by design of the education system became very familiar with my birthplace’s history.
As a social scientist, I study processes of polarization, dehumanization, and demonization of others. I know from both personal experience and professional expertise that peace education counters those conditions which lead to violence.
Trump’s call for “patriotic education” is dangerous.
Our schools need peace education to help contend with this moment of reckoning with racial and other forms of inequality in a genuinely inclusive way
Instead, our schools need peace education to help contend with this moment of reckoning with racial and other forms of inequality in a genuinely inclusive way – and give our children the best opportunity to learn from the disastrous mistakes of the past.
As Germans we are still grappling with a genocidal history where both victims and perpetrators of the Holocaust are alive. I remember reading a children’s novel in school depicting the rise of the Nazis through the eyes of a German boy and his Jewish friend who tragically dies in a bomb raid huddled in the doorway of a bomb-proof bunker. The families who once happily lived alongside his family in an apartment building denied him entry, because it was their patriotic duty to protect the “German race.” His parents had already been arrested and most likely sent to be killed after those same neighbors reported them to authorities.
Later, in formal history classes, I got an unfiltered curriculum that laid bare that ordinary Germans CONTINUE READING Peace Education, Not Patriotic Education - LA Progressive