To launch my new home, I decided to do a post on a positive and welcome initiative that has been launched in Greece. It is called The Peace Education Project.

Peace Education embodies the very essence of education, it’s methods, principles and overwhelming potential, so that we may offer and nurture within all our children those attitudes, values and skills that are conducive to living in harmony with others, respecting their human rights, resolving conflicts non-violently and building understanding and solidarity with those who are different in culture, religion or language.

The aim of the project

is to intergrate peace pedagogy in the Greek school system and beyond, in order to nurture the young in a value system that responds to the most urgent needs of the planet today: a just equitable and sustainable peace

The project will train teachers on peace education through a series of seminars. These teachers will then be able to take that knowledge back into their own classrooms. The project has several long-term goals after the initial first year (taking place in Athens)

To formally intergrate Peace Education into the Greek school system To develop country-specific curricula starting from pre-school, through primary to secondary levels To continue training teachers in Greece to become agents of change To set up a Peace Education Centre within a university or as an independent NGO in Greece To contribute to the spreading of Peace Education in the region by collaborating with other similar centres and projects

The Peace Education Project was set up by the Women's Iniative for Peace (Winpeace). I wish them great success on this much needed project. (I am hoping my kid’s school will be inviolved) For further details, please email peaceeducation9@yahoo.gr. Information is available in English and Greek. For the speech given by Shirin Youssefian Maanian, assistant project coordinator at the launch of the project on the 5th May 2006, please read on…

Technorati Tags: greece, peace education, multicultural

WHY PEACE EDUCATION IN GREECE?
Shirin Youssefian Maanian

Introduction: 2,500 years ago a rather famous Greek said: ” I am not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world”

A few weeks ago walking past Kypseli square I heard another Greek…a mother, call out to her child ” Don’ t run off or the Albanians will eat you” And then just a few days ago walking past a school in Kato Patissia I saw a group of children playing together: it was like a Benetton advert: Greek, black, Asian all in seemingly perfect harmony and I smiled. What I saw in the school playground, to me, is the only way forward and I believe it can be a reality in Greece. More than a reality: the prevailing norm. But right now we are at a cross roads and we have a choice; a challenge.

Some people might say “Why Peace Education in Greece? We’re not at war; (although we almost went to war with our neighbour Turkey in 1996). “We are a peace loving, tolerant nation with a proud history of being “filoxenoi”, our crime rate is still relatively low and we are the founders of democracy.” But we are not living in the Greece of the past. Violence in the home, against women, at schools is on the rise and what I particularly want to focus on: Mass immigration during the 1990s, changed Greece from a relatively isolated society into a multicultural one. It’s all very well having “peace” in a homogenous society but it’s when you throw in multicultural and multi-faith, that things get tough.

The Situation in Greece right now
There are an estimated 1.1 million migrants living in Greece. Greece has traditionally been a tolerant society. But recent polls have been rather disturbing: Greek Helsiniki Human Rights Watch points out that Eurostat shows that Greeks are the most racist in Europe. A recent poll conducted by TNS ICAP and the Gallup International Association showed that views on migration are split. Of those questioned, 47 percent see migration as a bad thing, while 43 percent see it as good. Greeks displayed the most negative attitude in Western Europe toward migration, with 65 percent believing that immigration harmed Greece. Next were the Germans (62% against immigration), Irish (64 %) and Swiss (54 %). According to the MRB poll, 53.8 percent of Greeks are very or rather bothered by the presence of people from different ethnic groups in Greece, while 42 percent believe that the employment of foreign workers probably or certainly does not help the Greek economy to develop.

The Media in Greece has proven to be a contributing factor to these attitudes: (sociologist and criminologist Angeliki Halkia says )” the way [the media] report crimes committed by foreigners can in no way be described as the same as those committed by nationals” And criminology professor Kathleen Spinelli notes in the foreword to the study”Criminology of Migrants”, supervised by criminologist Alexandra Moschopoulou, who works for the Ombudsman and deals with the issue of the daily press, the press “negatively distorts the image of the migrant contribution to the rise in crime in Greece.”

The release of yet another survey ; this time by the European Monitoring Center on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC); shows that Greeks are the most xenophobic Europeans; and despite the fact that Greece has greatly benefitted from the one million or so immigrants who want to work in the production and services sectors of the country - 87.5 percent of Greeks see migrants as a threat to society. So as not to point the finger only at Greece, according to the same survey one in two Europeans is xenophobic and one in three is racist.

After the recent riots in France, officials in Brussels had to concede that after 50 years of immigration policies the assimilation of immigrants has not been achieved. So can we please finally admit that something is not working?!

The School System

A recent study (Frangoudaki-Dragona) showed that professors and school teachers in Greece are more racist and intolerant than their students. Well that’s good news as far as the youth of today but hardly inspires confidence in whom we are leaving our children with for the large part of their childhood and teenage years; According to data provided by the Hellenic Migration Policy Institute (IMEPO) there are 108,000 children who are foreign nationals studying at primary and secondary schools across the country in the 2005-06 school year. The figure represents about 6.8 percent of the total student population at these two levels. A decade earlier, there were just 8,455 foreign children registered at Greek schools. Two-thirds of foreign students are from Albania, IMEPO said, while schoolchildren from Bulgaria and Romania make up 10.5 and 4 percent, respectively.

According to data made public by the Immigration Policy Institute (IPI) one of every 10 pupils in secondary education in Attica is the child of immigrants from a non-European Union country, with Albanians comprising 80 percent of all foreign students. In schools in the City of Athens, some 18 percent of pupils are the children of immigrants.

For today’s teenagers here in Greece, the word “Albanian” is tantamount to a four-letter word. Both Greeks and Albanians agree on this, as was confirmed by a recent poll of students in the Grava schools in Galatsi and in other areas, such as Kypseli and Metaxourgeio. The responses given by Valentinos and Yiannis, who attend a technical high school in Metaxourgeio, were similar. “Some of the teachers have problems; There are rows at school; We are separated into Greeks and Albanians; There are fights.”

The good news is that an article from Kathimerini quotes “Educators say that this increase in numbers has helped make Greeks more accepting of foreigners in the school system and of foreign schoolchildren reaching the top of their class.” On the other hand, the country’s education system has been far slower to adapt. Teachers said that primary schools with a large number of foreign students sometimes adapt the teaching curriculum accordingly.

Unlike in other multicultural countries, however, the Greek education system does not take into account the student’s own culture. Under no circumstances would the curriculum be changed to introduce the culture or history relating to a foreign child in a Greek school, a source quoted in the article said. Credit has to go to Greek teachers in public primary and secondary education who have in recent years braved the challenging conditions with virtually no training in peace education, world citizenship or multicultural education. Yet the fact remains that 59 percent of Greeks are against the idea of a multicultural society. However I am more than hopeful that this huge challenge for the domestic education system and Greek society as a whole hold very positive prospects for the country’s future.

The State of course has a huge responsibility to respond to this major challenge. But there is a great bonus at hand: Success will guarantee the integration of hundreds of thousands of fully assimilated young people into the country’s work force and these people will inject Greek society and the economy with fresh energy, dynamism and diversity.

But What if?

George Santayana (philosopher, poet and novelist) said that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, …

I’ve lived in the UK for most of my life and the 60’s, 70, 80s and recent times of course have been marked by race riots and violence, the same can be said for the US and of course other parts of Europe such as France. I’m sure you have many of those tv images in your head. So far Greece has been spared the angry mob violence and race rioting we have seen in other countries. A group of young immigrants in Greece were interviewed about the recent riots in France. They all said the actions were wrong. These youths are the first generation of immigrants in Greece. They are not Greek citizens but they feel gratitude to the country that has taken them in. BUT What will happen, if 20 years from now their hopes are dashed and their children are treated as second-class citizens? How long will it be before the frustrations, disenchantment, abuse, lack of places to worship and economic pressure provoke more than just a peaceful march in Syntagma?

The Role of Peace Education

About 6 years ago I asked an internationally renowned Professor of conflict resolution about how he thought the Cyprus situation could be solved. He said that 25 years ago he would have started a programme of peace education in all the schools: the children in the north would be taught that the children in the south were their brothers and sisters and vice-versa, and they would be trained with positive models of conflict resolution. Then he added today those children would be the adults trying to solve the conflicts. They would be a lot more successful. Education — formal and informal — is indisputably the most effective way to shape values, attitudes, behaviours and skills that will equip the peoples of the world to act in the long-term interests of the planet and humanity as a whole. Political action alone cannot offer a permanent solution. It is a change in human attitudes, among ordinary people and their leaders that will provide real change and this can come about through Education.

Peace Education

Peace Education provides the values and skills for living in harmony with others, respecting their human rights, resolving conflicts non-violently and building understanding and solidarity with those who are different in culture, religion or language. It would be a gross underestimation to think that these goals are merely utopian conceptions. There are now well-documented experiences in several countries worldwide showing the effect of such an education on the societies where it is applied. (We’ll hear from our trainers; all in the field - shortly)

Conclusion

In conclusion, peace education and particularly its underlying principle of world citizenship is a concept as challenging and dynamic as the opportunities facing the world community. We would be wise here in Greece to embrace it courageously and be guided by its core values in all aspects of our lives — from our personal and community relations to our national and international affairs; from the work place and the media to our legal, social and political institutions but most importantly in our entire school system. This is the challenge. We are at a crossroads. A culture of peace is an age old dream of humanity. There have always been people and groups who have had a vision of peace but to make this dream a reality each one of us has a duty to contribute to creating the culture of peace Let us not look back in 20 or 30 years and say ” If only”