Yearly Meeting 2024: Preparation - part ten
The Friend’s reports from Yearly Meeting preparation sessions and special interest meetings continues
Ellis Brooks and Izzy Cartwright, from Quaker Peace & Social Witness’s peace education team, led a session on Hope and imagination: peace education in 2024. Peace education is ‘multilayered’, said Ellis, incorporating ‘our personal sense of wellbeing’ and the skills needed to cultivate peace ‘at the interpersonal level’. The next layer of thinking, said Izzy, is about ‘our communities’ and the relational approach set out in QPSW’s Peace at the Heart publication. This includes how schools can be democracies, she said, describing how some have councils, and others pause the school day for different age groups to interact. The outer layer, she said, is thinking about international justice and our relationship to the earth. Young people are often concerned about the climate crisis and armed conflict, said Izzy, ‘so we don’t want to leave a sense of helplessness’.
