Be Wary of Peace Education

How the UN agency, UNESCO’s, redefinition of what’s considered “peace” or “violence” is designed bring in ALL the harmful education agendas parents are concerned about

Considering that the U.S. re-joined UNESCO in July of 2023, and that adopted documents by the United Nation’s General Assembly are considered soft law, the implementation of UNESCO’s updated 1974 Recommendation through their recent Peace Education Report will have huge implications on how America educates its youth. It will influence their values, attitudes, and beliefs so that they’re critical of the founding ideals of the United States that guarantee our national sovereignty and promote individuality, while indoctrinating them into a collectivist mindset that believes global governance by unelected bodies like the United Nations and radical progressive policies like a global Green New Deal are the means to peace.

What is peace? Many would define it as the absence of war or armed conflict. According to UNESCO, by that definition, the situation that nation states have generally been in could appear positive, as “only 17% of countries were engaged in armed conflict in 2019.” Even so, UNESCO would like to redefine and broaden the scope of what peace and global security actually entails in order to infuse all of education with their Maoist brainwashing program under the guise of “building lasting peace.”

The Redefinition of “Peace” and “Violence”

In UNESCO’s report, Peace Education in the 21^st Century: An essential strategy for building lasting peace, peace is said to be “not just the absence of war and direct violence (“negative peace”). It also involves resolving the underlying causes of conflict that can lead to violence and war (“positive peace”).” However, the conditions for both negative and positive peace have been defined by UNESCO to suggest that they are all-encompassing (e.g. to include what they call “unconventional” threats to peace, such as “climate change, social injustice, migration, the scarcity of resources, pandemics,” etc.—Figure 1). UNESCO wants students to view “unconventional threats” such as climate change as problematic to peace “on par with nuclear proliferation.” Peace, according to UNESCO, also requires the “presence of factors that make society less violent, unjust and inequal.” It is this broadened definition of what promotes peace and prevents violence that will enable peace education to allow for a variety of interventions and topics that go far beyond the scope of dealing with and preventing actual armed conflict to include subjects like critical race, queer, and environmental theories.

Figure 1: Excerpt from pg. 6 of UNESCO’s 2022 Technical Note “Current Understandings, and Threats to Lasting Peace,” whose content was used to inform their Peace Education in the 21^st Century report.

The definition of what UNESCO considers “violence” has also been expanded  to include “hidden” and more “indirect forms,” targeting what they say are structural and institutional forms of violence encoded into “norms, customs and laws” of certain systems that perpetuate inequities which lead to poverty, conflict, and war. By their definition of violence, for example, students could be taught through peace education that America’s free enterprise economic system of capitalism (because of its unequal outcomes), and not allowing men to participate in women’s sports (because the lack of acceptance that men who identify as transgender are actually women upholds inequitable societal gender norms) are both barriers to peace. (Figure 2) The real goal of peace education in this context will be to get students to develop a critical consciousness through a method called systems thinking—to believe the way certain systems of society are built is to benefit some and disadvantage others (root causes), to know their position in that structure (oppressor or oppressed), and to help them understand their role (i.e. becoming an ally/activist) in dismantling those social structures through which people are dominated and oppressed.

Figure 2: Excerpt from page 4 of UNESCO’s Peace Education in the 21^st Century report

Indoctrination through Peace Education

In New Understandings of Education's Contributions to Peace, one of the three technical notes used to create UNESCO’s Peace Education report, it’s proclaimed that resolving the underlying causes of conflict that can lead to violence and war (“positive peace”) includes putting into place a holistic (Whole Child) learning model and certain transformative educational frameworks that teach subject matter which UNESCO believes will promote in students the “knowledge, skills, attitudes, values, and behaviors required to change from the personal to the ecological.”(Figure 3) In other words, students will need to learn in such a way as to engineer in them a global mindset that will turn them into advocates for the completion of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 2030 agenda; an agenda which UNESCO believes will help provide the conditions for peace. Unfortunately, while many of the SDGs sound like noble goals (zero hunger, no poverty, quality education, clean water, etc.), it could be argued that some are being pursued through the globalization and domination of all systems of civilization in the name of global equity. The global equity that’s touted as a condition for peace, though, would require a global redistribution of wealth and resources (i.e. global communism) through a global system of governance (e.g. by the United Nations, or Artificial Intelligence) to make that a reality. Students will have to be convinced through peace education that this method of governance is preferable to nation states having their own sovereignty and making decisions on how to govern themselves and their resources at a local level, and that solutions that promote global solidarity and a shared responsibility (accountability) to sustainable development are the ways to foster peace.

Figure 3: Page 5 of “New Understandings of Education’s Contribution’s to Peace” (2022), one of the three technical notes UNESCO used to create their 2024 Peace Education report, lays out the educational frameworks peace education will have to include to promote “positive peace.”

Social emotional learning (SEL), an educational intervention that play on students’ innate desire to show empathy and take other people’s perspectives to manipulate them into a global worldview is listed as just one of the many “holistic educational agendas and pedagogies” that can be used “in the development of the whole person” in the pursuit of peace. UNESCO has consistently mentioned SEL as a necessary tool in its achievement of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. That’s because SEL uses a highly criticized psychological method called sensitivity training to coerce students into thinking that the common good of all should be prioritized over the welfare of the individual by promoting socialist policies. Some of the other educational frameworks that are mentioned in UNESCO’s paper that could help them do this are “Peace and Human Rights Education, Global Citizenship Education (GCED), Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), and Education for Health and Well Being (EHW).”

These frameworks will demand the integration of all the education agendas that groups like the parent organization Moms for Liberty and others have been warning are indoctrinating students to radicalize them against America and Western values. The table on page 8 of their document (Figure 4) lists the learning approaches and educational practices that they say will foster conditions for peace. It will incorporate topics and modalities such as these:

·         Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE) will be an essential tool to get students to understand the “patriarchal institutions that threaten the lives of women, children and the LGBTQ+ community.” CSE will also teach students as young as 5 about sexual stimulation and pleasure, with the reasoning that teaching kids about sexuality as young as possible will help them avoid eventual unwanted early pregnancies that leads to conditions of poverty, which UNESCO says can then lead to violence and war.

·         Global Citizenship Education (GCED) will help students recognize their role & responsibility to the rest of the planet as a “global citizen,” not an American citizen.

·         Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) gets students to view climate change as an existential threat to peace so they will view Net Zero policies favorably. ESD will encourage individual and collective behavior-change (e.g. not eating meat) to accomplish the SDGs.

·         Digital Citizenship will teach free speech regulation on the internet (because uncensored speech can be a tool of “indirect violence”) is a good way to foster peace.

·         Culturally Responsive Teaching (CRT) and Restorative Justice will require learning and conflict resolution at schools to happen through a Critical Race Theory lens to promote peace.

·         (Action) Civics Education will recommend the idea that the U.S. could have more peace if they moved away from being a Constitutional Republic to a Direct Democracy (mob rule/popular vote only) and do away with the Electoral College. As a part of promoting civics through peace education, students will be spurred on to get involved with marches, protests and advocacy groups that further this agenda, along with other social justice issues.

·         Education for Health and Well-Being—because it addresses the broader physical, mental, and emotional health and well-being needs of adolescents—will necessitate turning schools into mini hospitals called Community Schools. Community Schools will provide medical services and interventions to youth—including “gender-transformative comprehensive sexuality education” that deal with their Sexual and Reproductive Health (SRH)—via the CDC’s WSCC (Whole School, Whole Community, Whole Child) model and the Whole Child Design Principles. The argument will be made that the school ensuring the basic needs of the student are met (socialist state-style) promotes learning and prevents conditions for violence. Eventually, it will also be argued, as is already happening in school-based health clinics in states like California and Minnesota, that it is the student’s “right” to access those services (e.g. vaccines, puberty blockers, morning after pills, etc.) without the consent of their parents to do so.

Figure 4: The table that spans pages 8-9 of UNESCO’s Report describing all the goals, objectives and transformative practices they want to implement through peace education and the various dimensions they’ll cover

Peace Education Will Be a Whole-of-Society Endeavor

UNESCO makes clear in their technical note, The role of non-state actors (NSA) in the promotion of peace through education, that the contributions of non-state actors (NSAs) “are important to meeting the principles of the instrument [updated Recommendation]…in its desired alignment with the Education 2030 Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)”; specifically, the “important role in the provision of educational interventions that support peace.” Non-governmental actors include, but are not limited to: private schools, research bodies, civil society organizations, networks of schools and associations (like the NEA), philanthropic organizations, corporations providing education (and non-education related) goods and services, media, faith organizations, museums, libraries, after and out-of-school time entities, etc. All of these NSAs represent sectors of our society that can be held accountable in providing peace education to students in line with the updated 1974 recommendation and UNESCO’s Peace Education report. This will likely be exacted through the Whole Child Design Principles (mentioned above) that will ensure the entire community—based on the concept that learning happens “anytime, anywhere”—will be forced to provide a learning environment for students that reinforces this collectivist worldview. In order to be prepared to do this, adults in the community providing any services attached to education (e.g. at your local Boys and Girls Club or 4-H program) through WSCC’s public-private partnerships will have to be re-educated through adult education to adopt this mindset, too.

Considering terms like “peace education” and “whole child” sound inconspicuous, unsuspecting legislators and community council members could easily adopt language that cements this anti-American, Marxist agenda of UNESCO’s into law and policy. Please share this article with them to inform them to be wary of peace education and any initiative that redefines peace in this way.

Lisa Logan is the host of the YouTube Channel Parents of Patriots and author of the Substack Education Manifesto. Find her on X at @iamlisalogan.