Tomorrow, Tuesday, September 21, has been declared as a day of peace, especially within the school communities in Cameroon. While this is a laudable initiative aimed at imparting a culture of peace at an early level in the school milieu, education authorities need to go beyond the event by crafting visions and views around a sustainable and holistic flagship programme on Peace Education in Cameroon.
In September 2003, AFRICAphonie held a one week workshop on "Designing curriculum and training of teacher trainers for Peace Education in Cameroon'' in Yaounde. The workshop brought together more than 80 teachers from secondary schools in Cameroon to work out guidelines for designing a curriculum on peace and nation building.
The outcome of that workshop was the production of trial copies of a Students' Reader and Teachers' Manual on Peace Education in Cameroon secondary schools. Those trial copies are still lying in our office waiting to be transformed into booklist tools. The participants and organisation, however, observed that a manual of Peace Education for students and teachers will be incomplete without involving school administrators who are both policy makers and decision implementers in the school community.
According to 63 of the 78 respondents (from the workshop evaluation), Senior Discipline masters/ mistresses, Vice Principals and Counsellors are at the centre of conflict negotiation (most often through violent techniques) with students in schools, hence the need to equip school administrators with cognitive, affective and psycho domains techniques that can enable them manage conflicts with greater creativity and understand the concept of Peace Education in a holistic manner. Against a backdrop of juvenile delinquency and widespread despair and frustration, the school environment is becoming highly undisciplined and lawless.
The response so far has been for school administrators (particularly those charged with maintaining discipline) to employ "violent" strategies (corporal punishment, hard labour, exclusion etc) as a deterrent. While it might be prejudicial to dismiss these strategies, three events in some high schools and our Universities come to mind. In a high school in Douala, in 2001, a student who had been dismissed by a decision of the Discipline Council waylaid the school's Discipline Master and stabbed him to death. In another High School in Yaounde in 2002, a Discipline Mistress killed a student while meting out corporal punishment on him.
The Discipline Mistress is still under custody. In the Northwest Region, in 2004, the Principal's house (of a lay-private school) was set ablaze after a student strike (the Principal had dismissed the whole class and asked students to reapply). In early 2005, all six State Universities went on strike leading to the destruction of property and the death of a number of students. Part of the blame was apportioned on the poor conflict management of the college administrators. Many of such incidents, albeit not of the same magnitude, have definitely taken place without drawing media attention.
Human right activists continue to argue that these "violent'' techniques are a travesty to the Cameroonian parliamentary law that forbids corporal punishment, and to two United Nations documents "the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and "the Convention on the right of the child''. Unfortunately none of these documents has proposed alternative non-violent discipline/conflict measures that will maintain a culture of peace in the school environment without jeopardising the student - administrator relationship.
There is, therefore, a need for more workshops and seminars to be conducted for school administrators that will focus on developing a climate that models peaceful and respectful behaviour among all members of the learning community and providing a forum for discussion on alternative non-violent strategies on managing conflicts and maintaining discipline in schools.
Since Peace Education is seen as a process involving a set of attributes among persons upholding values of justice and human rights, the general impact of regular workshops and seminars is to affect legal and attitudinal changes both on students and school administrators with the result that there will be increased awareness in interpersonal and human relations (human right) cooperation, tolerance and understanding (good governance), dialogue and confidence - building (democracy) and the rule of law.
Furthermore, regular discussion forums expand the democratic space of dialogue, tolerance, and dignity of the participants and the workshop products (CDs and handbooks) help replicate resolutions to those who may not have been invited. Workshop modules on various skills (communication and active listening, cooperation, empathy and compassion, critical thinking and problem solving, patience and self control, leadership, vision etc), knowledge (self awareness, justice and power, theories of conflict analysis, human rights etc),
and attitudes (self respect, tolerance, respect for human dignity and difference, gender sensitivity, social responsibility etc) can greatly transform the teacher with contagious effects on the learner. I am sure this is a challenge that teachers' associations and teachers' trade unions can take in tandem with educational development partners if peace education in schools is meant to be not just a one-off event or a classroom subject but a life activity.
However the snag here is that the school community cannot be divorced from societal chores. If the ingredients of peace which are social justice and social equality are not manifest in the political arena; as long as our society is replete with high profile corruption, horizontal and vertical economic inequalities and a layback political class that relies on hoodwinking and voodoo rulership, no amount of peace education shall penetrate the cardinal walls of our classrooms
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