As we said earlier, the peace education programme in a school is basically a character building intervention based on a human, civic, moral, and spiritual value system with stress on developing peaceful living competencies in children. In fact every good school has moral and values educational programmes in some or other form. A peace education programme can incorporate all such good efforts. The innovation should be evolutionary, i.e. building on the existing efforts rather than to be revolutionary in trying to be different or go against them.

A single interested teacher can design a peace education programme for her class. However, if it is to go beyond the classroom level interest, the support of the principal is necessary. A principal who wants to introduce it to his school can design a programme with the support of the staff. Here we discuss designing a programme at the management level.

1. Identify Needs

Designing a programme begins with identifying the existing needs. Suppose in your school you observe constant restlessness in students. This state of mind is expressed through the forms of quarrelling, fighting, complaining, shouting and other various disturbing forms of behaviour.

Suppose to aggravate the problem you begin to see that students are increasingly getting into smoking. They seem to take a proud act of masculinity, a fashion they have learnt from the mass media.

You are also not satisfied with the present attitudes and the mindset of the adolescent students in the school. For example, they have little respect for others, including teachers. The relationship with the teachers is getting distanced gradually. Mutual respect is deteriorating even among themselves. You get complaints increasingly about bullying. Students' attitudes towards the country, culture and the social problems are mostly negative. You wonder how they could ever be good citizens and you want to change the way things go.

2. Decide Objectives

Given this as the state of arts, what needs do you identify here for a peace education programme ? Such needs have to be stated in form of objectives. For instance, from the above situation you can decide the following objectives:

1 Reduce restlessness of students in the classroom and school.

2 Implement strategies to prevent and reduce student conflicts.

3 Develop an awareness project for students and parents on the harms of smoking.

4 Organize a counselling service to prevent students from smoking.

5 Identify preventive strategies that could be taken to stop smoking.

6 Initiate a Values Education Programme with emphasis on developing respect and concern for others, healthy patriotism, concern for the society and citizenship

In deciding the objectives it is necessary to analyse the existing apparent conditions. The problems you see on the surface may often be symptoms of deep causes. For instance, in the above case one has to question what the causes for student unrest are. If the actual root causes of the problem are not identified then the superficial measures taken externally will not resolve them. In the above case the deep causes might be that students' true intellectual, social, and spiritual needs are not addressed by the school. They may be discontented with the present teaching process and lack of relationship with the teachers. A peace education programme basically addresses the deep psychological causes of the seeming problems. Such analyses of the causes are important in breaking the broad objectives into specific objectives. For example, the first objective 'Reduce restlessness of students in classroom and school" might be broken into such specific objectives given below:

Improve the quality of teaching and learning process in the classrooms by introducing new methods such as participatory learning, through staff development and supervision programme.

3 Set a period at least once a week in the class to voice and express students' problems related to learning and other needs with the class teacher. Take prompt action to address their problems and needs.

Practise relaxation exercises, meditation or short energizing physical games and activities when the teacher feels students are beginning to show restless behaviour.

Perhaps a teacher from a good school may not see such deficiencies and tends to think that peace education is only for problem- schools but not for his school. In fact starting from problems may not appeal to some. Instead one can start from a positive approach and identify the necessary developments in children from the existing situation. Strengthening the present positive attitudes and behaviour is always necessary. Perhaps when the positive qualities develop the negative ones may easily disappear. Even a best school needs to keep going all the good traditions established there in. Introducing new traditions and attitudes are necessary all the time. A school has to continuously work to strengthen and nourish the existing school culture.

Levels of Needs

In identifying needs, your scope should be broader rather than being limited to one level. There are four levels of needs, to be identified in designing a peace education programme. They are

(1) Individual or self-development level

(2) School level

(3) National level and

(4) Global level.

There are many important self-development needs in children that are not sufficiently addressed in the process of schooling. The mostly felt need is building an effective, integrated personality in the child with positive self-esteem. To live peacefully an individual has to have many skills. For instance, skills related to afftrmation, positive thinking, empathetic listening and communication, assertive behaviour, decision-making and critical thinking are very important (We have discussed them at length in the earlier chapters). School should help children to develop such skills so that they are empowered as individuals in the society.

At the school level, the predominant need is to have a peaceful climate, i.e. a peace culture. When there is such culture, children will naturally absorb the spirit of peace from it. There is a popular saying that peace has to be caught rather than be taught. Initiating a peaceful culture in school should start from withiil the staff, by developing attitudes and behaviour of appreciation, co-operation, belonging, trust and spirit of learning. By way of developing a friendly and mutually respectful teacher-pupil relationship a peace culture will bloom naturally in the school. To ensure it, the school has to introduce a living system of peace values, norms and practices into the daily life of the school. In this context it is necessary to change the teacher-centred classroom approach to child-centred learning. When there is active and participative learning in the classroom, using interesting teaching and learning methods a friendly and lively atmosphere marked by creative expressions of potentials and self-discipline will emerge naturally. Teachers have to identify many effective strategies and practices that could transform the school into a place of peace and harmony.

Taking the national level into consideration, a school has to focus on the current citizenship education needs of the nation or the country. This aspect of citizenship education is an integral part of peace education. Education is entrusted to produce good and productive citizens to the nation. In this regard learning and understanding the current socio-political and economic problems and issues is also important.

Students as future citizens need to develop healthy and realistic perspectives to view their problems in the society.

Coming to the global level needs, it is important to recall the fact that the ultimate purpose of education is to produce a world citizen. No country can live in isolation in the present. Children have to develop a sensible worldview. The need here in is to broaden the vision. With this objective in mind the school can select current world issues to raise the global awareness in the students. Such issues may be selected from the themes.

o Commonality and diversity of human cultures

0 Population

o Destruction of the ecosystem/pollution

o Gender issue

o Racism

o World poverty

o Problem of war/terrorism

o Trading relationship

o World cultures

o Animal rights/animals threatened by extinction

In designing a peace programme for the whole school, it is always necessary to discuss with the members of staff to order and assure the validity and relevance. Parents also can provide good insight. The existing values programmes need to be studied analytically in order to find their strengths and weaknesses. Furthermore a survey of the present curriculum has to be done to identify the given peace values in it. What are the relevant values, concepts or issues that could be further included to enrich it? Perhaps you can learn from the experiences of the existing good moral or values education programmes in the neighbourhood schools as well. The intended programme also needs to be checked by the students' opinion. You can present the basic programme to a sample of senior students in an easy to understand way and get their views. By way of giving a checklist to a sample of students it could be validated.

3. Prepare Plan of Action

A programme is a series of activities put in a time sequence frame in order to achieve certain predetermined objectives. What are the activities that will bring students towards the expected goals? They should be relevant to the achievement of the specific objectives. The activities in a comprehensive peace education programme come under six levels.

1. The staff development level.

(e.g school based teacher development, model lessons, reading) 2. School management level

(Preparation of peace education policies, supervision, evaluation, facilitation) 3. Formal subject teaching and learning level

(i.e.. Incorporation of peace values into lesson development) 4. Classroom management level.

(e.g. Classroom code of conduct) 5. Co-curricular school activity level

(e.g. Peace week, organizing lectures, peace committee ) 6. Community level.

(e.g. Raising community awareness about the harm and negative effects of smoking)

In the proceeding chapters more suggestions for activities are given. An action plan should also be devised for responsible persons or groups who will implement each activity. Delegating the responsibilities to suitable teachers is necessary.

4. Run the Programme

The most important phase of a programme is the implementation of activities. As mentioned above, the activities are done during the delivery of the curriculum classroom interactions, and in co-curricular projects within the school and thp community.

5. Monitor the Activities

To assure oneself, it is necessary to remind, check the preparation, counsel, and facilitate and supervise the implementation. It is necessary to check what has happened and to what extent things have gone according to the plan. The monitoring is necessary both at the administrative level and professional level. In a programme of this nature mon.itoring usually takes the form of supportive and friendly supervision.

6. Evaluate

To evaluate is to judge the worth of a programme. It determines to what extent it has been able to achieve the objectives. Evaluation is done in two phases, namely during the implementation in order to correct and improve the process then and there, and at the end of the programme to judge the effectiveness and to learn from the experience with a view to enriching and planning the next cycle of the programme. Evaluation is done on the basis of the objectives determined at the beginning of the programme. The achievements of a peace education programme is not so easy to measure as compared to other subjects like mathematics because of its subjective nature of the learning experiences received. New insights and learning gained during the experience surely have their impact on behaviour. However, such affective learning needs to be related to new conducts expected. The emphasis and establishment of new patterns of conduct and norms are necessary. For this purpose every peace learning activity should follow a discussion on ways of applying what was into an everyday behavioural pattern. Thereafter they need to be strengthened by constant reinforcements. A proceeding chapter discusses further the methods of evaluation of peace education.

Concluding Thoughts

A peace education programme can put together all the character-building efforts of school into a single project with a view to ensure the effective implementation. Here in the role of the principal's leadership is crucial. The process of planning the programme has identifying needs, deciding objectives, deciding activities, implementation, monitoring and evaluation.

Things To Do

1. Conduct a peace education need identification survey in your school and present it to the staff.

2. Study good peace practices in other schools in your education division.

3. Draw up a programme for your school.