Peace Times Edition 79

Beginning with the Children: Betty Reardon, Peace Educator

Betty ReardonGandhi said, “If we want peace, we have to begin with the children.” The United Nations designated 2001-2010 as The International Decade for a Culture of Peace and Non-Violence for the Children of the World. No individual has done more to build a culture of peace around the world through education than Dr. Betty Reardon, who founded the Peace Education Center at Columbia University Teachers College in 1982. Working with universities, professional associations, the United Nations, and other international organizations, she has trained educators and promoted peace education everywhere for more than 40 years, and is slowing down only a little in her ninth decade. Dr. Reardon’s publications include Sexism and the War System (1985), Comprehensive Peace Education (1988), Educating for Global Responsibility (1988), Women and Peace: Feminist Visions of Global Security (1993), Educating for Human Dignity (1994), Tolerance: The Threshold of Peace (1998), and Education for a Culture of Peace in a Gender Perspective (2001). In 2004 Betty was nominated for the Volvo for Life Hero Award. She was among the 1000 women from the global peace movement jointly nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

MLL: You’ve been a peacemaker through an expanse of years that conventional history defines by wars, from WWII to Iraq. The 60s and the Vietnam War were a turning point for many people. How did that time affect you?

BR: I haven’t had any Damascus Road experiences, and I don’t believe most people do. I have learned breakthrough things that mattered, but I couldn’t have learned them without the experience to integrate them into. Change is an organic process; profound changes have their roots in prepared soil.

That said, the convergence of the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement did deeply radicalize the way I look at the world. Before that I thought if we followed a path of democratic progress and brought others along on that path we’d get where we needed to be. Then I came to see that there were lots of problems with the path itself.

I had been aware of racism before, and I could see that it clashed with our articulated American ideals. Until the 60s, though, I thought the laws and value principles were there and we just had to implement them. Then I saw flagrant violations of principle in public policy and in the law itself, and I saw that structural change was needed. I began to wonder what was in the psyches of people who accepted or who constructed and benefited from the policies of war and racial oppression. That led directly to my professional concern with education for critical thinking, to address the contradictions between the principles and the problems.

MLL: What do women contribute to peacework that is uniquely ours?

BR: I wouldn’t say uniquely. We have been the caretakers of a number of human capacities because of gender role separation. We are socialized to be caregivers—to keep the ship afloat. We understand that maybe all the passengers don’t like each other, but we’re all going to sink together unless we get along. Carol Gilligan describes how women look at conflict resolution in terms of trying to keep relationships intact, while men will sever the relationships if they’re not comfortable or they’re not seeing them as to their advantage. Women’s responsibility has always been to larger units than themselves, to their families and communities.

In the West we’re all embedded in individualism, but compared to men we women are more communalized, and we value being in relationships with others. That’s where our peace action comes from. Everyone values what they do with their time and energy. Women’s time and energy go into building families, homes, businesses, communities that we don’t want to see destroyed. This moves us to work for peace.

photo by Patricia Smith MeltonI have seen brain research that concludes that certain gender differences, including caring and aggression, have been encoded into us—not just biological functions like giving birth, but being responsible for the survival of the infant and the group. But today I see men who are choosing to be primary parents and who can do everything but breastfeed. They learned how from watching others. We can all learn new behaviors. I don’t want to see that research interpreted as some kind of scientific essentialism or fatalism of the “men can’t help it” sort. That is not acceptable to me as a teacher.

MLL: You have used the phrase positive peace. How do you define that?

BR: It’s the sum of the conditions that enable people to live in a truly human way. Today, though, I prefer the term foundational peace: the basic necessities for humans to survive and strive toward being full human beings, the foundation for democratic political structures to assure negative peace, the renunciation of violence.

A society that strives toward positive or foundational peace honors the values of peace and human rights and builds appropriate institutions to safeguard them. Early in our history the US had such a socio-political opportunity because we were so far from the imperial seat in Britain. We “severed the ties,” as it says in the Declaration of Independence, in a typically masculine way, and then set out to enshrine the principles of democracy and justice that rationalized the separation in our national institutions. We still have much to do to realize those principles in this country and in the world. We still don’t have global institutions based on such principles, though we’ve been evolving in that direction for a few hundred years.

Since the end of World War II and the founding of the United Nations, we have the norms of the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights—a radical disjuncture from nation states functioning in the world in their own national interests. Since World War II, the major threats to people’s human rights have come from their own governments. So we have to do more than end war. We have to create the institutional conditions that safeguard human rights and make war unnecessary. And, of course, since the 1980s, our own US government has been one of the greatest obstacles to the progress of global norms. We’re going to have to dig our heels in again and insist on change.

photo by Patricia Smith MeltonMLL: What gives you the most satisfaction when you look back over the span of years?

BR: It is knowing that even though certain hopes we had for specific accomplishments have not been realized, the movement goes on. It is seeing young people take up the struggle and redefine it. I get excited when I spend time with these young people.

I spent the fall semester teaching in Japan, where I met young women and young men from many parts of the world interested in the relationship between gender and peace. There was a young man from Indonesia in one class whose cause in life is eliminating domestic violence and implementing Security Council Resolution 1325, calling for women’s full participation in peace and security policymaking. The resolution itself gives me tremendous satisfaction, being the product of women peace activists. And think of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in 1948! A little group of people envisioned it and made it happen: Eleanor Roosevelt, Dr. Charles Malik from Lebanon, PC Chang from China, and Rene Cassin from France. That’s mind blowing! Half a dozen people at the UN, meeting in Paris, convinced all the rest that there had to be such a document—the most transformative document that the human race has ever produced.

We’re taught that the idea of rights flows from the Magna Charta, but that was just a bunch of powerful guys confronting another bunch of powerful guys. This is REAL change, asserting that all humanity, every individual can claim all these rights. And it is so prescient of the needs today! So many are still struggling for these rights as the foundation of a just peace.

What thrills me, then, flowing from this, is the whole movement to view women’s rights as human rights. It has put the women’s movement in a larger context where it cannot be denied or relegated to some side category. When the language shifted from “women’s rights” to “the human rights of women”, the world recognized that women are fully human, no less worthy of dignity and rights in any way than men, and that their full equality is an essential condition of peace.

MLL: What gives you the most hope for the future?

BR: Every day I see so many individual efforts, making significant change at various levels. A few days ago I sat with a group of women, several from Kenya, discussing how to help Kenyan women get back on their feet and get on with what they were doing before the violence. That same week I corresponded with another group working to preserve Article 9 of the Post-World War II Japanese Constitution, which renounces war, meant to prevent that nation from re-militarizing like other major powers have done. They are planning an international conference, hoping to make the renunciation of war a larger global discussion to both save that article in the Japanese constitution and convince other nations to adopt similar constitutional provisions.

People aren’t giving up, even though we in the US have never had leadership as lacking in ethical capacity and human sensitivity as we do now. It tears my heart and it blows my mind, to see what we have wrought in the world, but we can’t give up, and we’re not giving up!

MLL: You said “We cannot achieve change unless we can think it.” On your best, most hopeful days, what’s your vision for the future?

photo by Patricia Smith MeltonBR: The institutional design intrigues me, but what really makes a difference is the life that the institutions sustain. I envision a world in which all the parents of all the children who are born can worry about their individual health and development and not the conditions around them that could keep them from thriving; a world in which human needs are met and people can explore and develop all their human capacities, unfettered by gender discrimination, political oppression, or poverty; a world in which we celebrate the differences that widen the power of human capacities, and celebrate what it is to be human.

There will always be conflict, there will always be deep differences, but we can learn to deal with them without rationalizing the destruction of the different. We can learn to enjoy the differences.

MLL: What do you say when people call you “the mother of peace education”?

BR: I didn’t give birth to it. I came as a teacher into an arena in the peace movement where people were already working. My work has been relatively visible, for some reason, but I didn’t start it all.

Humans are a social, communal species. Peace education is derived from interacting with other people and their different ideas. I was an agent and a catalyst for something that was simultaneously underway in Colombia, the Netherlands, England, Germany, India, Norway, and Nigeria, all around the world. What is most distinct about my work is that it is internationally derived. I did not hone my theories by talking only to other Americans—and that has been my great blessing. It taught me the importance of multiple perspectives on our common problems.

MLL: What would you like to tell people who read PeaceTimes?

BR: Please tell women everywhere that no matter how much progress we make towards women’s equality, our humanity will always be threatened as long as we live in a war system. We have to work together to change that system. As long as we see our security as coming from that system, we will be insecure. It’s not only about ending the conflict in Darfur or the violence in Colombia or the war in Iraq, or meeting any one isolated goal. Until we abolish war and set up new institutions, it will be repeated generation after generation in different forms.

Peace Times Archive