UNICEF (2000) provides a very comprehensive definition of quality education that includes healthy learners who are well-nourished, are ready to participate and learn, whose learning is supported by their families and communities; healthy, safe, and supportive environments; content that includes the foregoing elements and peace; inclusive child-centered processes that are facilitated by competent self-driven teachers; and actual outcomes that encompass life-supportive knowledge, skills and attitudes, and are linked to national goals for education (equity) and positive participation in society. Particularly critical (for sustainability) is UNICEF’s statement that effective and appropriate stimulation in a child’s early years influences the brain development and is necessary for emotional regulation, arousal, and behavioral management.
Published in Chapter:
The Universal Language of Sustaining Quality Peace and Resilience: Enhancing Learning and Harmony Across Cultures
Mafole Sematlane (MakeOver Institution Building, Lesotho)
Copyright: © 2022
|Pages: 27
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-6684-5034-5.ch009
Abstract
Humanity's traditional approach to social problems, inequities, and abuses has been a deficit approach, using force, largely reactive, taking recourse to legalistic action, protests, or demonstrations. Social problems, inequities, and abuses continue despite efforts at building peace and resilience. Experts say that society knows very little about what peace is, and what it is not, because it studies peace only in terms of war, violence, aggression, and conflict. They advise that power (love) accomplishes with ease what force (fear, separation – legalistic action, warfare, protests, etc.) even with extreme effort cannot. This chapter introduces the universal language of and the underlying processes for sustaining quality peace and resilience as the means for affecting the necessary change from the deficit approach to power-based approaches. Teaching and learning the language of sustaining quality peace and resilience at all levels of education will contribute to quality education and education equity significantly.