Microsoft Word - IFP V 16 Howard Richards.docx Volume 16 Number 1 (2022): 85-90 http://www.infactispax.org/journal 85 Volume 16 Number 1 (2022): 85-90 http://www.infactispax.org/journal ISSN 2578-6857 Review of Magnus Haavelsrud, Education in Developments. Volume 3 (Oslo: Arena, 2020)1 By Howard Richards Professor emeritus Magnus Haavelsrud, of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, has been a leading thinker in social science, peace studies and peace education for more than half a century, often working closely with Johan Galtung and Betty Reardon. This new volume can be read as carrying forward both their work as well as Professor Haavelsrud´s own earlier contributions. It will be of interest to anyone who is, as we all should be, interested in building a peaceful world; more particularly to scholars who practice interdisciplinary social science; and most particularly to those of us who work in the field of peace studies. The use of the plural in the title, Education in Developments, emphasizes that there is more than one possible development, and hence more than one possible role for education. Development at its best is peacebuilding, and it is what drives the author´s life and his scholarship. As in his earlier works, Haavelsrud provides a living counter-example to the stereotype of peace studies as a field with more good intentions than scientific rigor, and he has done so without surrendering to 1 E-book (ISBN 9788291040103) $4.99 and Paperback (ISBN 978-82-91040-09- 7) $10.99. Volume 16 Number 1 (2022): 85-90 http://www.infactispax.org/journal 86 another stereotype: one that equates scientific rigor with using positivist methodologies. Chapter 1, Rethinking Peace Education, co-authored with Alicia Cabezudo of the University of Rosario in Argentina, addresses the questions, “How is the constitution of this pedagogical democratic subject related to peace learning processes? How do the content, form, and contextual conditions in which this process occurs affect the constitution of a peaceful democratic subject open to transformation, solidarity and change by nonviolent means?” (Haavelsrud 2020, page 41) The second chapter, Learning Human Rights Practice, deals at length with the question, how can a learner become what Haavelsrud calls “a protector and not a violator human rights?” (Haavelsrud 2020, page 44) The answer to this question concerns both content and method. The content features understanding the connections among direct, structural, and cultural violence. The method must be designed to encourage learners to become active thinkers and not merely passive receivers of knowledge. The third chapter, Analysing Peace Pedagogies adds more insights concerning participatory methods. Oddbjørn Stenberg of the University of Tromsø is its co-author. The fourth chapter is called Three Roots of Transdisciplinary Analysis in Peace Education. The three roots are three vastly different cases, one in Italy, one in Japan, and one in South Africa. The general approach of transdisciplinary analysis passes a severe test when applied to peace education in three such different contexts: Mario Borrelli´s work among sub-proletarians in Naples, Yoshiko Nomura´s idealistic peace education rooted simultaneously in Japanese religious traditions and in an idealist reading of the natural sciences, and the work of Nelson Mandela and others under extremely adverse conditions in South Africa. The fifth chapter, The Academy, Development and Modernity´s “Other,” problematizes the extension of western conceptions of knowledge to make them global standards. The genealogies of the western ways of thinking that have been imposed on the rest of the world can be traced to the Roman and British empires. Nonetheless, “modernity´s Other” continues to exist and to function in daily life in many parts of the world. Chapter 5 seeks ways to support a “transformation of the academy by enlargement” (Haavelsrud 2020, page 97) that pursues cognitive justice, committing universities to correcting cognitive injustices of the past. Volume 16 Number 1 (2022): 85-90 http://www.infactispax.org/journal 87 Chapter 6 is titled Contextual Specificity in Peace Education. Given that subjective orientations as well as objective conditions define context, this chapter studies novels by young South African authors, looking for what Paulo Freire calls “generative themes.” Peace educators can use generative themes to facilitate conscientizacion, defined by Freire as “learning to perceive political, social, cultural and economic contradictions, and acting with the purpose of eliminating such contradictions…” (Haavelsrud 2020. page 114) Chapter 7 is called Learning About Contextual Conditions from Narratives. Three narratives of heartbreaking extreme suffering in South Africa contribute to “…enlargement of knowledge through their empathy for the protagonists, allowing a formulation of generative themes, focusing contextual conditions in need of change.” (Haavelsrud 2020, page 145) Chapter 8, Power and Knowledge in Multi-Paradigmatic Science, relates discussions of the relation of power to knowledge by other thinkers to a central preoccupation (of the chapter) with what to make of the very influential, although constantly varying throughout his career, views of Michel Foucault. A key point is: “What is missing in his work are attempts to find answers to the question: in whose interests and on which normative base social science research is founded?” (Haavelsrud 2020, page 156) Chapter 9 on educational polices, which is, like Chapter One, co- authored with Alicia Cabezudo, is generally oriented toward the policies of democratic governments where policy-makers realize that the survival and flourishing of democracy depends on educational outcomes where students become human rights protectors. Peace education blends with human rights education and education for democracy and the rule of law. Chapter 10 is called Peace Education Confronting Reality. The main reality confronted is neoliberal control of the main institutions that determine educational policy. “I therefore conclude that neoliberalism in educational policy-making is an obstacle to designing peace education processes for experimentation aimed at increased political awareness in confronting reality.” (Haavelsrud 2020, page 184) The name of the eleventh and last chapter is Revisiting Peace Learning Methodology. Four key concepts defining the content of peace education are taken from Johan Galtung: Equity, Empathy, Healing of Trauma, and Resolution of Conflicts. There follows a discussion of methodological issues in teaching positive peace, so defined, with a focus on transforming contextual conditions so that positive peace is made stronger and negative peace weaker. Volume 16 Number 1 (2022): 85-90 http://www.infactispax.org/journal 88 These eleven chapters, and indeed the whole life of its author, are remarkably persistent in doggedly pursuing what is in essence a single question: What can we do as human beings and as educators with rational grounds for believing that our actions will have the results we intend? The results we intend are named Peace. Peace is initially defined, following Johan Galtung, as increasing empathy, equity, transformation of conflicts, and healing of traumas. But this is only initial. Filling in the meaning of these four pillars of peace, and complementing them with other perspectives, is ongoing. The question to answer is how education can support, and perhaps initiate, upward movements toward more peace. A key theoretical premise comes from Pierre Bourdieu: The objective social world over time tends to seek harmony with the subjective dispositions of the people (habitus). Following this line of thought, a premise announced in the first chapter as applicable to all chapters is that educational energy from below and political energy from above over time tend to seek harmony with each other. Education can be a force for change. Otherwise stated, the conflict between culture and structure will continue as long as what the first prescribes is not what a description of the second describes. Again following Galtung, peace education can be seen as trilateral. First it is about understanding the world as it is. Second it is about the future as it will be. Third, it is about changing the future to make it conform more closely to what should be. In their methodologies for understanding, or “reading” the world, Haavelsrud and his co-authors learn a great deal from Paulo Freire´s method of codification and de-codification. Echoing Habermas and Freire himself, they find the subjective life-worlds of the learners to be crucial for moral learning, or, in more Freirean terminology, consciousness raising. Haavelsrud is especially interested in “reading” the life-worlds of people who live in violent contexts, under brutal dictatorships, and where authoritarian regimes make it impossible to do peace education in schools and limit it to informal and non-formal learning sites. An important practical lesson is that learning to participate in discussions and to reason together is more important than the conclusions that may and may not be reached. For example, if I were a secondary school teacher in a rural district in a red state in the USA, it would be more important for my students to learn to participate in reasonable discussions, and to respect one another´s contributions to them, than to acknowledge the fact that Biden got more electoral college votes than Trump. Volume 16 Number 1 (2022): 85-90 http://www.infactispax.org/journal 89 Anticipating the future requires life-long engagement of peace educators, and the university programs that prepare them, with the many issues endlessly debated in the social and natural sciences and the philosophy and methodology of science. It requires welcoming voices that colonialism silenced. But, even though peace education in principle includes diverse paradigms and diverse perspectives, it is not true that nothing is predictable. It is predictable that if the currently dominant macro structures do not change, humans will make their habitat uninhabitable. Although this particular issue is not discussed in this book, it appears to be assumed that the same absence of peace education that excludes the discussion of other major issues facing humanity from the classroom excludes the critique of the social forces producing ecological disaster. Similarly, the same participatory democracy that peace education practices at the micro level will tend over time to produce more egalitarian, more free and more fraternal macro structures conducive to facing, freely discussing and rationally reversing humanity´s march to eco-suicide. A commitment to striving to change the future to make what will be more like what should be makes peace education a normative field. Peace is an ideal. Teaching peace is teaching ideals. In the words of Haavelsrud, who in turn quotes Betty Reardon, “Peace education is, therefore, not only an experiment with ideas but includes the goal of acting for transformation of both self and world. This implies “… to promote the development of an authentic planetary consciousness that will enable us to function as global citizens and to transform the present human condition by changing the social structures and the patterns of thought that have created it.” (Haavelsrud 2020, p. 185, quoting Reardon 1988, p. x) Given that its author appropriately acknowledges the normative character of peace and peace education, a limitation of this volume concerns the status and nature of ethics and human rights. The author´s preface calls for making human rights and ethical standards foundational for human society. But this theme is taken up in the following pages more implicitly than explicitly. It is implicitly assumed that the structural change peace education contributes to achieving will feature, and perhaps even be structurally constituted by, one or another version of solidarity ethics – not by the liberal and libertarian ethics that underpin today´s global neoliberal hegemony. And it is implicitly assumed that the structural change that educators working to change culture will help to bring about will honor human social rights that today exist more on paper than in practice. It will not just guarantee first generation human rights, and indeed, when push comes to shove, Volume 16 Number 1 (2022): 85-90 http://www.infactispax.org/journal 90 sometimes it will favor the need-based rights of 1948 over the entitlement-based rights of 1789. More explicit attention to such issues, including their implications for curriculum planning and for educational policy, would have been welcome. This limitation should not obscure the depth and breadth of Professor Haavelsrud´s contributions. For more than a half century now he has been carefully contributing to building solid foundations for a science (or sciences) and a practice (or practices) of peace. Hopefully, this new volume will make his work more widely known and more deeply appreciated. References Haavelsrud, Magnus, Education in Developments. Volume Three. Oslo: Arena, 2020. Reardon, Betty. Comprehensive Peace Education: Educating for Global Responsibility. New York: Teachers College Press, 1988.