Educating for Peace: From Pieces to Peace

Introduction

Peace is essential for the vibrancy of human beings and the fullness of happiness in our moral ecology which respects life and supports human development and community (Danesh, 2006; Kotler, 2007; Lam, 2015; Novak, 1996, Murphy, 1999; William and Murphy, 1990; Thompson, 2002). Peace exists in our just relationships with ourselves, others and nature. Harris and Synott (2002, p. 4), two distinguished peace educators, state that peace education as “teaching encounters” that should draw out for people the (1) desire for peace, (2) non-violent alternatives for managing conflict; (3) and the skills for critical analysis of the structural arrangements that produce and legitimate injustice and inequality. Business education is advocated to include peace education when business schools want to embrace their role as peace builders (Graham and Requejo, 2017; Institute for Economics & Peace, 2018; United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization, 2018). It is exceptional to find any business school that will write the desire for peace and the skills of conflict resolution as the outcomes of marketing education. Will marketing educators be requested to enhance students’ desire for peace when they teach students to learn how to use consumer analytics, artificial intelligence or big data for being more competitive?

Many business educators hope students to have more consciousness of themselves and others in their choices, in particular when there are pervasive on-line business education and increasing violence in social media technologies in the United States (Carr, 2008; Dolby, 2013; Konrath, O’Brian and Hsing, 2011; Natale and Libertella, 2016; Waddock and Lozano, 2013). From the author’s twenty-one years of experience with her business students in the United States, Hong Kong and China, she finds that most students tend to accept the business reality as a battle field rather than a system for human flourishing. She assesses more students are distracted and self-centered in the classrooms. She examines the common approach of teaching marketing is at best a piecemeal approach. Such an approach denies the inherent characteristic of wholeness of students and their calling. Students are trained to fulfill marketing functions¹ for the sake of organization objectives without being taught to treat people as sacred beings, and being critical to injustice in the global market structure. She believes that it is a priority to guide her students through a broad range of classroom activities to understand and experience how marketing relates to our human well-beings, to discover who they are, to awaken their conscience, to aid them to use their conscience as their witness of the laws written on their heart, to assist them in developing awareness of certain virtues, to rouse their empathy toward others, and to encourage them to commit to the highest Good with their free will and wise choices.