“Is an education for peace possible?” Piaget asked and attempted an answer to this question in 1934, in response to the League of Nations’ largely failed effort to promote international collaboration. He called for honesty: “education for peace” hasn’t worked; nations continue to be distrustful and view each other as impediments to their own nationalistic goals.
One problem, he argued, is a generational divide between youths and those who experienced the horrors of the first world war. The latter understand the reasons and merits of educating for peace. Youths, in contrast, view such teachings as yet another instance of adults preaching and moralizing over issues that have little meaning to the circumstances of their daily lives.
A second, related problem is pedagogical in nature. Although the teaching of international cooperation was widely embraced, it was “exceedingly superficial and avoided the real psychological motives of actions”, seeking to “fill the minds of students with… ready-made opinions (rather than) bring out in depth the intellectual and moral tendencies conducive to true collaboration”.
Piaget maintained that a true education for peace requires understanding the viewpoints of others, especially those that diverge from one’s own. The ability to adapt oneself for the purpose of foreseeing and explaining the “motives of the stranger”, requires distance from “false ideas and personal prejudices”. Our obligation, then, is to “learn to place ourselves in the community of other people”. “Above all let it be understood that, in all things, truth is never found ready made, but is laboriously elaborated through the very coordination of these viewpoints”.
Translated excerpts of his paper appear in an issue of The Genetic Epistemologist (Piaget on Peace and War, Vol. XVII, No. 3, 1989), JPS’s journal for many years. JPS members can access our archive of the GE on the membership page.
