By Stephen Perlman | Director, U.S. Operations
It began with a question and a vision from HTAC's executive director and founder, Suraya Sadeed. For generations, Afghan children have grown up in a culture where they have known nothing but war, violence, and aggression. Why are we not teaching them about peace?
From those early days in 2002, when HTAC helped sponsor some of Afghanistan's first peace education workshops for teachers, the dream of implementing formal peace educaiton courses into Afghanistan's national curriculum has now taken a huge step towards becoming a reality.
In recognition of our leadership and track record in implementing results-based peace education programs in five provinces for over 53,000 students, Afghanistan's Ministry of Education endorsed HTAC's recommendation to develop a national school-based peace education progrram for all Afghan public schools.
This will be a huge undertaking and will involve strong educational partners as well as support from institutional as well as individual donors, but based on what we have seen in the field over the past 9 years, the implementation of a national peace education curriculum will have a dramatic effect, not just with children, but with teachers, parents, and entire communities
For vulnerable Afghan children, especially boys, learning about peace will be life-changing. Many of them will learn how to cope with the emotional trauma they've suffered in witnessing or even experiencing violence first hand. They'll learn how to accept and respect different ethnic groups and replace fighting and harassment with non-violent conflict resolution skills and cooperation. Most importantly, they'll learn to reject violence and extremism and embrace the principles of peaceful, everyday living.
Thousands of Afghan teachers who have never had formal training will learn to abandon counter-productive corporal punishment practices as a way to motivate students and replace those behaviors with positive role modeling. Parents will learn how to reinforce peace education in the home and establish an environment of good communication and trust with their children. Local communities will help ensure the lessons of mediation, cooperation and problem-solving (all learned in peace education) will carry far beyond the classroom and into neighborhood councils and Shuras.
HTAC is working hard to make peace education, not just a program, but a way of life for the next generation of Afghans.
Project reports on GlobalGiving are posted directly to globalgiving.org by Project Leaders as they are completed, generally every 3-4 months. To protect the integrity of these documents, GlobalGiving does not alter them; therefore you may find some language or formatting issues.
If you donate to this project or have donated to this project, you can receive an email when this project posts a report. You can also subscribe for reports without donating.
