You must have heard many remarks about war and peace. Here is one I heard recently and I’d like to share with you. It goes like this: “We have so many schools to train people to engage in war, but we don’t have a single school to coach people to realize peace.”
It doesn’t matter who is the first to make that comment. The point is that the statement, echoed by many, really makes sense. Now, discourse of war and peace, an age-old universal topic, is once again on everybody’s tongue, in the wake of the military conflict in southern Lebanon. Scenes of carnage in the region have challenged the civilized sensibility and stirred passions that debilitate reason for the combat. With civilian casualties going up, people began to doubt the so-called martial ethic and the effect of modern military education, which is supposed to instruct servicemen to minimize collateral damage by maximizing precision with the application of hi-tech weaponry.
That remark disputes a phenomenon that almost everybody takes for granted. Few know when and where the first military school was set up. Probably the systematic training of military personnel is as old as the war itself. Today, military academies, army colleges, navy institutes and other martial training centers are everywhere, and many of them are among the most renowned colleges nationwide or worldwide.
By contrast, there is no institute with prestige and first-class professoriate that purports to cultivate proficient peacemakers and peace workers whom the world is crying out for. Now is the time to establish the first peace university of the world with the help of the United Nations, as well as governments, enterprises and individuals around the globe.
Establishing such a school might be a new frontier of investment for the world’s philanthropists and millionaires. However, money is not what we are solicitous about, and neither is the faculty. What we require most is the resolution and farsightedness. Here, necessity is the mother of establishment. If we, the members of the world community, do think we need an entity to systematically train those who are determined to dedicate their lives to human harmony into expert functionaries, then we’ll probably see a peace academy come into being next year.
It’s not hard to find cases here and there that involve peace education for preschoolers and primary school pupils. Quite a number of kindergartens and primary schools have made “no shooting” their iron rule. In some daycare centers, no toy weapons are allowed and any kind of fighting is strongly disapproved of by teachers. But that kind of education seems weak, sparse, temporary and even helpless compared with a stubborn social disposition that connives at jungle law. A sad fact is that TV and movies have somehow contributed to that tendency. Evidence shows correlations between prolonged juvenile exposure to video media and a proclivity to physical aggressiveness.
A boy who was educated to cherish peace in his preschool years will grow up to meet a different world, where an insidious psychic illness is sprawling. Fellows with the ailment always overrate cannons while underrating canons. He will also find that he may earn bread and butter for his family and lead a decent life if he is enrolled in a famous military academy, while a peace pursuit may turn out to be a dream, which can hardly be realized in his lifetime.
A chronic paradox since the genesis of human society is that war has been a flourishing business and now shows no sign of relegation, although an overwhelming majority of humans regard it an anathema. Meanwhile, peace has seldom been made a real business, something people wholeheartedly seek, rely on and even become addicted to.
The major reason for this odd phenomenon is that numbers of people firmly deem that military operation is the most effective measure in cracking the hard nuts that have much to do with their rights, territory, property and interests. Pride, trophies and rehabilitation that martial triumphs would bring about have given rise to an uncomfortable sense of dependency on war. When people say force is the final resort, they actually imply that guns speak ouder than songs. If they always reserve force as the final means, it probably will be an eternal trump.
Few have relish for tragedies wrought by war, but you’ve got to do something to make people’s proclivity for fighting gradually peter out, and transform by piecemeal the soil for nurturing belligerency. An honest and civilized nation can feel no pleasure in the exercise of force over its neighbors and other nations.
So the good news is that people still love peace and hate war, and the bad news is some involuntarily appear to prefer force to diplomacy. Can the present human inhabitants of this planet stop war forever? It is, indeed, hard to say. This is a conundrum for all nations. But let us try. Let us embark on a fresh undertaking--to make peace a daily and permanent business, not just an occasional issue when war breaks out. If we can make peace a huge and omnipresent business, then it is likely to be the very nail in war’s coffin. As a major part of that business, we should launch a large-scale education campaign that should go on for good. Even when peace is genuinely prevailing and never challenged by any bloodshed, such an education ought to be continued.
Peace education involves universal enlightenment that should be introduced, as a required course, in all primary and secondary schools everywhere. People are not necessarily created peace-loving, as some claim. They must be infused with peace and benevolence. Furthermore, peace edification must be a cradle-to-grave process and no one should be left behind.
As for the proposed international peace academy, first of its kind, I sincerely hope that all governments think it over. It’s not enough to understand that peace is essential for humanity. We need a legion of peace mavens who are obligated to study the accesses to eternal and global peace. These people are the graduates of the designed academy. Before we answer the question of where we came from and where we will go, we have to figure out what peace means for us, and why we haven’t made substantial progress in creating a peaceful world.
In the past I heard a bigwig assert that peace could only be reached by force. But I’ve considered that allegation untenable. Now I venture to say that universal peace is impossible in the absence of education.省略