EDUCATING FOR TOLERANCE

Tolerance...Except in select circles, it’s a word you don’t often hear any more in this age of growing political incorrectness. But it remains the single-most important key to community by community peace. As such, it is also the prime key to world peace.

That said, although the need to imbue people with tolerance may not be an innate necessity, the societies, often indeed the families, into which we are born, tend to start undermining, from the time we are very small, the natural tolerance with which we come into the world. An infant doesn’t care what color the skin is of the person who is caring for him or her. Infants couldn’t care less what religion their care-giver professes, what sports team they are a fan of, how much money they have, what social class they belong to, where they went to school, whether they are literate or illiterate, whether they are gay or straight, or whom they voted for in the last election. The only thing small children care about is the care and love they receive from the people around them. Nothing else matters. Infants understand diversity: Differences don’t count. Only what people are willing to share with them. They perceive people the same way animals do—according to the love they receive from them.

But the influences of society—of social environment, as it were—begin whittling away at that marvelous natural tolerance from the outset.  There is a need, then, to teach tolerance, or to re-teach it, and it should be as much a part of the educational curriculum in secular public schools as reading writing and arithmetic, since it is just as vital, if not more so.

In the latest edition of the tri-monthly scholarly journal Teaching Tolerance, educator Elijah Hawkes wrote—in the wake of the neo-Nazi march earlier this year that sparked rioting and murder in Charlottesville, Virginia (USA)—that the incident had made him re-examine why he had chosen his line of work. Hawkes said that instances of intolerance and hatred like the Charlottesville tragedy were clearly linked to the emotional breakdowns of American youth. He said that the systematic pressure of such events on the society they live in meant that many of his students entered the classroom heavily burdened, even though they might not be capable of making the connection and naming the source of their anguish.

This was apparently more his reason for choosing to be an educator than knowledge of his course subject was. He had reminded himself, he said, that manifestations of hate like those seen in Charlottesville, “and those we continue to see in the workplace, in the media, and in our own (increasingly gentrified) communities” were social illnesses. His profession as he saw it, then, was not only an art, but also “a form of healing.”

In his Historia de Palestina (History of Palestine), Dr. Rolf Reichert talks about the once brotherly and sisterly relationship between Jews and Palestinians in Palestine. In a contemporary world in which Palestinian Muslims and Israeli Jews are stereotyped as mortal enemies, this has not always been true, if indeed it is today. In fact, according to Reichert, there is ample proof that between the end of the 8^th century and the beginning of the 20^th, Muslims and Jews who lived in Palestine shared excellent and fruitful relations.

The evidence is just as ample that the animosity that today exists between these two peoples and that has caused thousands of casualties in the intervening years, is the result of external factors, of the arbitrary re-drawing of the world map after both the First and Second World Wars, and of the proxy state of Middle Eastern countries in the struggle for supremacy being long waged between Western and Eastern superpowers.

Reichert points out that the Israelis and the Palestinians are both part of the same religious and political history and that they were long able to live together in peace in the past. “From time immemorial,” he writes, “there existed a moving custom in Jerusalem. Jewish and Muslim children born in the same neighborhood and in the same week were treated as foster brothers and sisters by their families. The Jewish child was wet-nursed by the Muslim mother and the Muslim child nursed on the Jewish mother’s milk. This custom established intimate and lasting relations between the two families and the two populations.”

This is a wonderful example of a concerted effort by two branches of the same people, separated only by their religions, to find a tolerant and empathic middle road on which to base a lasting state of peace and fellowship.

Today, in an ever more nationalistic and tribalist world where tolerance is too often confused with weakness or submission, more than ever before, education is at the root of world peace, where such unifying traditions have been forgotten or undermined by territorial, political or religious strife. But before such education can be instilled, the educators themselves must be educated to include tolerance and empathy in every subject they teach. This consists of learning to walk in the other person’s shoes and to live vicariously in his or her skin. Only then can educators shrug off their own learned prejudices and enter the classroom ready to embrace every type, color, gender, creed or condition of every student that they will encounter there.

In the end, once our basic needs have been satisfied, we are what we read and what we learn. The quest for world peace requires, then, that education soar above the fray of race, religion, social differences, sexual preference and political bent. Education should be a “sacred” if secular endeavor, designed not only to prepare young people for “making a living”, but also for making a life marked by diversity, acceptance, empathy and tolerance. Education should not only give lip-service to tolerance but should actively teach it as well, providing a vision of the world as diverse but free and equal, a world in which, no matter how different we might be, we are, in the end, all alike, in the deepest sense, and in every way that could possibly count toward world peace, cooperation and the pursuit of our individual and collective happiness.