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 8th
century and the beginning of the 20th, 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.
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