Peace education
I read Jane Harries’ article on the Centre for Peace Studies in Zagreb (24 January) the day before the eightieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, and less than a week after I’d come back from Beirut.
She makes an important point about peace education. It obviously goes much wider than study of the Holocaust or visits to the sites of past atrocities, moving though those can be. As Jane says, it needs to have a place in formal education, and I would suggest that needs to be in secondary education not just in specialist courses at university.
When I was in Kigali at the end of 2023 I visited the Rwanda Genocide Memorial and its education centre. As well as being highly informative, it was an intensely emotional experience. But I still don’t quite know how to process what I was exposed to.
By coincidence I’m currently reading Philippe Sands’ East West Street about development of the concepts of genocide and crimes against humanity, and where those terrible crimes came from in the twentieth century. I’m learning a lot, but we need more, and from an earlier age, if we’re really going to equip ourselves to build a more peaceful world in 2025 and beyond.
For me that means starting with schoolchildren. At Brummana High School in Lebanon, which is supported by the Quaker International Educational Trust, I and other trustees talked with some of the students about their experiences in the very recent war (and they do call it a war) between Israel and Hezbollah.
Strikingly, when thousands of families had to flee the south of the country and ended up in Brummana, all sorts of people and buildings welcomed them. The students talked about the food and other essentials they collected to help the refugees, and there was no evidence of the bitter animosity between different religious groups that was such a feature of Lebanon’s fifteen-year civil war.
Not only was there a sense of ‘we’re all in this together’ but also a feeling of optimism and hope for a more peaceful future – which those students intend to build.
In Kigali there was a group of schoolchildren at the memorial when I was there. More importantly, peace studies are now part of the country’s national curriculum.
I wonder what Quakers could do to encourage more policymakers and educators to help our young people acquire the tools for peaceful resolution of conflict.
Jeremy Holmes
Reality and visitation
May I respond to the letter in the Friend from David Fish (17 January)? I feel very strongly that Friends do need to visit people who are sharing worship online and ask to become members.
The internet is filled with unaccountable avatars and Friends just do not know what is real unless they can visit. (I am also thinking of sad stories I hear about fraudulent people in online dating.)
Trusting that something is real has to be a part of the equation when online. Then, of course, trust has to be earned through finding out if those Friends who want to become Quakers understand and aspire to the rainbow of features which make up ‘love’.
Anyone can use Zoom. Surely we are a community, where we help each other and learn from each other. I am not convinced simply worshipping together once a week on Zoom, and not getting to know one another, secures the direction of our travel. However, I have not joined Zoom worship groups and maybe there is lots of social time after worship where friends can get to know each other in the fundamentals.
My concern is that, unless these online Friends are known to a community of Friends, it is difficult to trust they will be able to understand the dynamics of a community and Quaker ways within those dynamics, however much they have read about them.
Thanks go to the editorial team at the Friend who shared David’s letter in a publication full of interesting internet articles.
Barbara Mark
