International education and the pursuit of peace: decolonizing international education
Overview
In this article, I question the purpose of international schools.
In an attempt to answer this question, I start by revisiting the original aim of what we call ‘international education’. Remembering its shared origins with those of the United Nations, and that its original purpose nearly a century ago was ‘Education for Peace’, I explore whether ‘Education for Peace’ might mean something different today.
I argue that a modern understanding of ‘peace’ demonstrates that international education should be fully and continually focused upon the principles of environmental sustainability, equality and equity, and that in order to do this it must eradicate the underlying attitudes inherent in a colonizing mindset.
At the same time, I discover the need to expand our understanding of the phenomenon of colonialism beyond the commonly received political definition.
In recognizing the tricky twofold task of educating to decolonize while simultaneously decolonizing education itself, I contemplate just a few of the ways in which present-day international education could begin — or is already beginning to — broach this challenge.
I conclude that we should be very cautious: if international schools do not constantly and exclusively pursue this goal of decolonization, they will almost certainly do more damage than good.
What’s the point of an international school?
What’s the point of an international school?
We can look to the origins of the world’s oldest international school as a reminder.
Established by a small group of families consisting of progressive educational practitioners and some of the founders of the League of Nations, (the precursor to the United Nations), l’École Internationale de Genève opened its doors on 17 September 1924, and became known as ‘Ecolint’.[i]
In the context of a Western Europe traumatized, and yet optimistic, following World War One, Ecolint’s founders believed that education was central to creating lasting peace and that pedagogical innovations were necessary in order to achieve that aim.[ii] This belief was in part a reaction to the nationalist, chauvinist [iii] education systems of the imperial era, as well as the dated teaching approaches of state schools in France, Germany, Switzerland, the UK, and the USA.[iv]
The first collective project for the initial seven students of this ‘bold new school’ was a co-educational, pluri-lingual, multi-age, project-based, open-ended, student-led practical inquiry: building a new rabbit hutch for the school rabbit[v]; an apt precursor to educational principles that are now the norm in most international curricula.
As an idealistic, not-for-profit testing ground for new educational ideas, Ecolint inevitably experienced its ups and downs[vi], yet survived — and then thrived. Also borne from the school was the now-ubiquitous International Baccalaureate (IB) in 1968[vii], the first international Postgraduate Certificate of Education (PGCE (International)) in 2010[viii] and many other initiatives now characteristic of what we call international education. To this day, Ecolint maintains, as an explicit goal, ‘Education for Peace’.
Education for Peace
The influence of Ecolint on international education, therefore, should not be underestimated, and it can be argued that any school that claims to be international draws on this heritage. Thus, modern international education rests on the shoulders of a single conceptual ‘giant’[ix]: Education for Peace.[x]
This aspirational ‘Peace’ is not a local, national or regional peace — or keeping of the peace — as is perhaps implicit in national education systems; nor is it an imposed or foreign peace, as might have been the context of the military and colonialist-era schools which taught home-country curricula in colonised countries. Instead, it aims at an international, global, universal peace.
This all sounds very utopian; but what might ‘Education for Peace’ actually mean in practice? To answer, let us briefly consider each of these terms: ‘Education’ and ‘Peace’.
‘Education’
In a temporal context, we can think broadly of human education as a process which draws on what we already know and understand about our past, combined with what we predict and want for the future, in order to form, inform and empower the people — particularly our children — of the present. Education is therefore dynamic, not just because the past and present are constantly evolving as each day goes by, but because our perspectives on our past and future shift: as we benefit from distance and new knowledge, we see how they may have been coloured by phenomena such as prejudice, ignorance and trends of earlier times.
In this regard, national education has a strong tendency to be nationally-centred: the education system will be aimed at what the nation state ‘wants’ for its own future, based on its own understanding and interpretation of the (or its) past (admittedly not isolated from an international context).
In contrast, when thinking educationally from an international or global perspective, the aim is to offer something alternative to national systems (be it the ‘hosting’ national system or ‘home’ country systems). A central characteristic pillar of such international educational thinking is currently described as aiming to produce ‘global citizens’ (from which should not be excluded the importance of local citizenship and responsibilities).[xi]
Of course, when discussing or designing international education it is impossible to completely escape personal, cultural and national perspectives and biases. This is increasingly recognised today as one of many reasons behind a drive to increase diversity and inclusion in all aspects of international educational design. For example, even the IB curriculum frameworks, those most widely used as alternatives to national-based curricula, have been accused of being traditionally Eurocentric in their origins and values, amongst other cited imbalances[xii]. Then again, it is with exactly these kinds of new understandings that collaborative educational design — ever-drawing on the past to empower the present for the best possible future — must constantly self-reflect, reassess and revise, particularly if it is aiming at universal peace.
And what is to be understood as ‘peace’ when discussing international education?
‘Peace’
It helps to remember that the Genevan origins of modern international education were intimately linked to the creation of the League of Nations in the wake of the First World War. Although the League was ultimately unsuccessful in its bid to stop another world war from happening, it was replaced in 1945 by the United Nations, a new-and-improved intergovernmental organisation aiming first and foremost at international (and ‘universal’[xiii]) peace and security.[xiv]
The United Nations continues to adapt and evolve in its bid for ‘universal peace’[xv]. In order to do so, it is currently focused on achieving 17 mutually dependent and integrated Sustainable Development Goals by 2030 (Figure 1)[xvi] . The fourth of these goals even explicitly targets ‘Quality Education’.
In considering the Sustainable Development Goals as a whole[xvii], we can infer that our modern understanding of ‘Peace’ is a world where there is no poverty, nature and natural resources are protected, where all people are free from harm and are equally able to thrive. ‘Peace’ is also a world which urgently prioritises those who are furthest behind in this regard, reducing inequalities and inequities (including in access to quality education), and which aims to eliminate such things as poverty, hunger, preventable disease and discrimination.
But the overarching focus of the UN is not just expressed through the SDGs. In addition, through themed, overlapping ‘UN decades’[xviii], the UN has recently called for the most immediate, persistent, international attention to a variety of related issues. With much overlap between these and the Sustainable Development Goals, what stands out is that there is only one political practice that is mentioned: colonialism. Similarly, only one set of behaviours is listed as demanding immediate attention: racism, xenophobia and related intolerance. These are closely associated phenomena which the UN urges are to be “fought” and “eradicated”: these are the ‘new enemies’ of peace, not just war itself.
Therefore, to summarise the global consensus in 2021 — and looking towards the 22nd century and beyond — in striving for ‘universal peace’, limiting wars between nations is far from enough. We need to actively and urgently focus on:
1. sharing and sustaining the limited natural resources of the planet upon which we depend;
2. guaranteeing equality and equity in access to human wellbeing, flourishing and development (and reducing inequalities more generally); and
3. eradicating colonialism and associated behaviours and ideologies.
Furthermore, it is hardly a leap too far to conclude that the major threat to achieving these first two elements of peace (and/or the cause of many of the global challenges we face) is colonialism, writ large.
But isn’t colonialism “the policy or practice of acquiring full or partial political control over another country, occupying it with settlers, and exploiting it economically,”[xix] and don’t we live in a post-colonial world?
No. Not really.
Colonialism
Colonialism is not a thing of the past. Despite the recent “violent, fiercely contested”[xx] fall of political empires (often falsely portrayed as peaceful, amicable transitions) such as those of Britain and France in the first three ‘waves’ of decolonisation, and the fall of the Soviet Union in the fourth, there remain ‘imperial continuities’[xxi] both between and within countries and regions. Moreover, how can the world begin to come to terms with and fully understand the truth and scale of the structural violence [xxii] we have inherited from colonialism without at least identifying its greatest atrocities? As I write this article, even in just the last week:
- the German President has just travelled to Namibia to admit to and apologise for a colonial era genocide of around 80 000 people carried out in 1904–1908.[xxiii]
- in Canada, the unmarked mass graves of over 1000 native children have been found at the site of two of the now-notorious residential schools which existed until as late as the 1990s. The schools were one element of the cultural genocide of natives — a genocide officially recognised by the Canadian government in 2015.
No doubt, there will be many more such admissions to come from all the former colonial powers of recent centuries, (and also from nations where oppression of indigenous and minority peoples has happened within the country). Kennedy alleges, for example, that extra-judicial 20th century “dirty wars” carried out by the British in such countries as Aden, Cyprus, Indonesia, Kenya, Malaya and Oman have left “scarcely a trace” in public memory[xxiv]. In this way, perhaps it can be said that each former colonial power is “not the country it thinks it is”.[xxv]
Confronting, admitting and coming to terms with the plethora of wounds caused by colonialism will take a long time in itself, and Canada’s own “unofficial poet Laureate”[xxvi] has estimated that it will then take “seven generations or 150 years to heal”.
Nevertheless, colonising in this typical political sense is not the only way to think about colonialism. We can probe deeper into considering human colonising.
Human colonising
If we think of a colonial system as a system of exploitation[xxvii] which often subordinates the colonised, removes their rights and voice and even ensures that they are subsequently dependent upon the coloniser, we can recognise that this is not just something that has happened between political entities. Consider the age-old practice of enslavement of individual humans by other humans (an ongoing practice to this day)[xxviii] and inherited structural racism[xxix].
Take, for another example (especially!), the feminist perspective: Mary Wollstonecraft already noted exactly this kind of colonisation by men over women in her 18th century European travelogues and philosophical writings[xxx]. More recently, ecofeminists such as Val Plumwood built on such insights, to conclude that the widespread exploitation was not just between the sexes, but gendered, and that the dominating ‘standpoint of mastery’ of ‘the male’ over ‘the female’ in globalised society is inseparable from the unsustainable exploitation of nature and natural resources[xxxi].
Extrapolating even further, in the light of current rapidly-evolving thinking on LGBTQIA+ emancipation[xxxii], we might describe Plumwood’s gendered colonisation as actually multi-gendered — (human) male exploitation of all that is non-(human) male — and that the values, attitudes and societal structures that ensured such colonisation are inseparable from those that that have led to unsustainable exploitation of our planet. To this we can in many cases add the racial dimension (e.g. white human male exploitation of all that is not white male).
Today’s most cutting-edge science states quite clearly that this exploitation has led us to a situation where our very existence as a species is now at risk[xxxiii] from, namely, “the three planetary crises that threaten our collective future:
· the climate crisis,
· the biodiversity and nature crisis,
· and the pollution and waste crisis”.[xxxiv]
Such self-inflicted damage would seem to come from a lack of understanding of the interdependence and interconnectedness between each other and between our own species and the very environment that sustains us; and of an assumption that ‘I’ or ‘We’ are somehow exceptional, more deserving, and isolatable from others and the world around us. (As a middle-aged, white, male, anglophone, cis-gendered, privileged European myself, I represent a demographic particularly guilty of this). Working against the prevalent and critically unsustainable human attitude of colonising other people and our planet Earth is therefore the only way to ‘Peace’.
Where can we start to correct this? The activist and Nobel Laureate, Wangari Maathai emphatically stated to me that it must start with “Education, Daniel!” If possible, such an education would be a true education for peace and should logically be the urgent, central priority for all human education systems if we are to attain the pressing UN goals as agreed by the world’s governments and avert the three planetary crises.
A twofold task: decolonising education while educating to decolonise
Thus, education must be the primary driver to ‘eradicate colonialism’ and colonising behaviour, in pursuit of peace with ourselves and with our planet. This is an Education for Peace, an aspirational, modern International Education. Yet the challenge is twofold. since dominant education systems themselves have been shaped by colonisation and colonialism: we must educate to decolonize while also decolonizing those education systems themselves.
As all major and national education systems begin to look at decolonising schooling in this dual manner, in international schools (and associated accrediting bodies, etc.) we have the luxury of not being obliged to follow one national perspective in the pursuit of global universal peace. With that luxury, comes responsibility: surely, it is imperative that we use our immense, unshackled privilege to be the trailblazing leaders, pioneers and laboratories of education for peace, at least as much as we can. If we do not, then our very existence as a class of people who stand at the summit of a global paradigm built largely on systems of exploitation is merely a hypocritical and dangerous perpetuation of colonial heritage.
How is that to be done? Space does not allow here to answer that question comprehensively, and I would not pretend to be the right person to answer! Nevertheless, there are international schools who are looking more closely at all their constituent parts as organizations through a decolonising lens, not just the taught curriculum. This is just the beginning of a mammoth task. Some are inviting independent review of their policies and practices regarding diversity, inclusion, equal opportunity and sustainability; some are democratising their decision-making and policy-making processes in an effort to make sure all parties amongst staff and students feel represented in all decisions; some are looking at representation in their staffing and student body; some are making books such as anti-racist literature (e.g. White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism) compulsory reading for all staff; some are looking at equality and equity between sexes and genders; some are offering or even actively promoting meals that are purely plant based; and many are working on several or all of these issues and others simultaneously. And, of course there is so much more: both in terms of what is already happening and — vastly more so — in terms of what needs to be done.
These innovations within schools are quite apart from those who would follow Ivan Illich in questioning whether even the basic idea of ‘the school’ as we currently understand it is itself a system of oppression complicit with a colonising mindset. His own vision of an education or learning system would look fundamentally different[xxxv].
Curricula for peace…in a global emergency
Regarding the curriculum and learning done at international schools, if ‘Education for Peace’ is an education aimed at building a fairer world that shares and sustains its nature and natural resources, we need to acknowledge that we are in the midst of a global environmental emergency. This emergency bafflingly dwarfs and is perhaps even the cause of the current COVID-19 crisis[xxxvi]: the future of our very existence as a species is in the balance[xxxvii]. In such an overwhelmingly extreme urgency, every element of every educational programme must prioritise Education for Peace, including the most widespread peace-based curriculum frameworks, those of the IB (its Diploma Programme (DP), Primary Years Programme (PYP), Middle Years Programme (MYP) and Careers-related Programme (CP)); and perhaps also the (non-IB) Universal Learning Programme (ULP).
Such frameworks are well adapted to prioritising a decolonised education for peace precisely because they are not curricula per se: they allow flexibility of content around the development of skills and attitudes such as critical thinking, based around inquiry. The accumulation of knowledge around principles and deeper conceptual understanding can be adapted to explore other perspectives, at the discretion of teachers.
Many of the schools already using frameworks such as those provided by, or inspired by, the IB are already capitalising on the opportunity they provide to facilitate learning that is ever more diverse in its questioning of the status quo and received knowledge of the colonialized past[xxxviii].
The example of history curricula
History curricula are commonly used in examples of thinking about internationalising learning and, as we constantly uncover new knowledge and understandings concerning the past, I can only imagine the challenges faced by those whose focus is to teach it as a stand-alone subject!
For example, we can consider the recent revelatory writing of Bruce Pascoe on Aboriginal culture and history in Australia.
In his 2018 book, Dark Emu, Pascoe comprehensively demonstrates that the received view of Australia’s original inhabitants as having lived nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyles has been “a convenient lie…to justify dispossession”[xxxix] of an entire continent from its people by European colonisers over the last two centuries. In fact, it would appear that Aboriginal Australians may have constituted the earliest society to have adopted agriculture (a phenomenon typically associated with designating a people as ‘civilised’), as far back as 100,000 years ago. This lie, he argues, is deeply embedded in how modern Australians — and the wider international community — perceive Aboriginal Australia. Astonishingly, the primary sources he draws upon to prove the high levels of sophistication in pre-settler society are actually from the diaries of colonising settlers themselves. The paradox is only possible because even those settlers who were most sympathetic to the natives they encountered were blind to the sophistication of their societies; culturally blind — because of their own education:
“The first colonists had their minds wrought by ideas of race and destiny…of the great British Empire. They were immersed in these stories as infants…standing to attention to ‘God Save the Queen…poring breathlessly over the stories of Horatio Nelson, the Christian Crusaders, King Arthur, Oliver Cromwell, and, of course, Captain James Cook.
Europe was convinced that its superiority in science, economy and religion directed its destiny. In particular the British believed that their successes in industry accorded their colonial ambition a natural authority, and that it was their duty to spread their version of civilisation and the word of God to heathens. In return, they would capture the wealth of the colonised lands”.[xl]
As a result, Pascoe is generously forgiving of the bias in the diaries of the first colonial observers when they were faced with what modern research is now uncovering as undeniable Aboriginal “agriculture, aquaculture, housing, storage, fire management, complex interconnected linguistic-spiritual-legal systems and longstanding inter-population peace and stability”, and yet failed to recognise it as such in their ultimately violent conquest.
History curricula can also reflect what kind of society we advocate. How much can the way we teach a subject such as history — focusing on winners of wars and one-sided conquests — even be linked to issues such as overly competitive school systems, where there must always be a winner, the award, the captain, the rep, the head boy/girl — systems which might reward a few and alienate or discourage the many?
At the time of writing, educational theorist Conrad Hughes is asking to what extent a colonial “type of global competition of Great Man History’ could be replaced by more inclusivist ancient approaches found amongst the colonised, such as Ubuntu: “Perhaps one day the past will not merely be a description of war, discovery and dominion, but…a story of common people”. The ecofeminist narrative cited above teaches us that we must go even further than that if we are to save ourselves.
Hughes argues that decolonising curricula is not just about “a superficial and rushed replacement of authors on book lists or merely throwing out the Western canon for the sake of it,” rather that it is about cultivating critical thinking around received stories and knowledge and “being more accurate, more inclusive and more interculturally responsive…not forcing one ideological perspective onto students; it’s about telling both sides of the story”. Integrating retelling of Australian history in Dark Emu into broader education and social conscience represents one tiny, albeit ground-breaking, part of that effort.
In the case of Australia, there is evidence that embracing and coming to a deeper, revised understanding of its Aboriginal past might not only provide more social harmony and equality, but also — in harnessing millennia-old Aboriginal agro-environmental practices — provide a better chance of overcoming Australia’s more pressing ecological urgencies such as fire and flood management, critical land degradation and depletion of natural resources and stocks[xli].
Beyond rebalancing history curricula and educating young minds, such lessons and reflections would inevitably inform SDG efforts internationally, also. It is no accident that the next UN Decade will focus on preserving and promoting indigenous cultures and languages[xlii], and thereby biocultural diversity.
The task of Educators-for-Peace
The Australian example is but one of many from around the world demonstrating the value in decolonising the understandings of our human past, present and future. If education worked to uncover, embrace and build upon such re-examinations, and as a direct result improve efforts to share our planet in a more equitable and sustainable way, that would absolutely fit today’s definition of Education for Peace.
So, as Educators-for-Peace, our curricular structures should work as frameworks, and we should work collaboratively to populate and constantly revise them to improve their diversity and accuracy in considering all ‘sides’ of any ‘story’[xliii]. Issues such as ‘sustainability’, ‘service’ and ‘global citizenship’ should not be add-ons: they should reside at the very heart of what we do. If an international school is both a societal microcosm while simultaneously being a constituent part of our current global society, the UN SDGs must be constantly present in our sights, explicit and implicit in the learning and development we facilitate.
Approaches which promote critical, conceptual and compassionate thinking (such as the Compassionate Systems Framework developed by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and others[xliv]) should be fully developed and integrated; and the innate inquiry of all infant humans should be maintained throughout life as a deep gut-instinct through not only the learning structure but purposeful practises such as Philosophy for Children. A love and understanding of nature and our place in it through outdoor education efforts such as Forest School is imperative in keeping sustainability front of mind. Interdisciplinary perspectives and content in all academic areas, along with school structures and procedures, should be constantly revised for diversity and inclusivity.
Mindfulness at the heart
At the heart of all of this lies fostering individual and collective mindfulness — mindfulness in itself, but also of the larger whole to which we are interconnected and (inter)dependent; and from which we cannot and do not exist in isolation.
I started by recalling the pacifist thrust of modern international education at Ecolint, Geneva, and built upon that to argue that a modern understanding of ‘peace’ demonstrates that international education should be fully and continually focused upon the principles of environmental sustainability and justice; equality and equity, and that in order to do this it must eradicate the underlying attitudes inherent in a colonizing mindset.
As international schools, can we really justify our immensely privileged position if we don’t work urgently, exclusively and innovatively towards this Education for Peace? If we do not , we run the very real risk of perpetuating the very colonizing tendencies that are a threat to universal peace.
Bibliography
Abdul Latif Jameel World Education Lab. Compassionate Systems & Mindfulness. Available from: https://jwel.mit.edu/tags/compassionate-systems-mindfulness [Accessed: 7 July 2021]
Aguilar, L., Shaw, D. M. P., Quesada-Aguilar (eds). (2013) A. Forests and Gender. IUCN, Switzerland.
Andersen, Inger. Solutions for a Planet in Crisis. UNEP 2021. Available from: https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/speech/solutions-planet-crisis [Accessed: 19 June 2021]
Bunnell, Tristan (2008) The global growth of the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme over the first 40 years: a critical assessment. Comparative Education: Vol 44, No 4 — Taylor & Francis. Available from: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03050060802481439 [Accessed: 18 April 2021]
Carey, J. (2014) Available at: https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26174177.amp . [Accessed: 21 June 2021. ]
CBC (16 Dec 2016) ‘Man who walks among the stars’: AFN honours tearful Gord Downie. https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/gord-downie-tragically-hip-afn-honoured-1.3883618
Chambers. (1993). The Chambers Dictionary. Chambers Harrap, UK.
CNN. Germany will pay Namibia $1.3bn as it formally recognizes colonial-era genocide. (28 May 2021) Available at: https://edition.cnn.com/2021/05/28/africa/germany-recognizes-colonial-genocide-namibia-intl/index.html [19 June 2021]
Council of International Schools (CIS). N.d. Global Citizenship. Available from: https://www.cois.org/about-cis/global-citizenship [18 April 2021]
Dasgupta, P. (2021), The Economics of Biodiversity: The Dasgupta Review. (London: HM Treasury)
David, Xoài (2020) Decolonise IB: How international schools are mobilising to diversify the expat curriculum. Available from :https://medium.com/@xoidavid/decolonise-ib-how-international-school-alumni-are-mobilising-to-diversify-the-expat-curriculum-cf3471816fa6 [18 April 2021]
Desai, Manali. (17 June 2020) ‘Students want to confront it’: academics on how to decolonise the university. The Guardian. Available from: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/jun/17/students-want-to-confront-it-academics-on-how-to-decolonise-the-university [18 April 2021]
Diangelo, R. (2018) White Fragility — Why It’s so Hard for White People to Talk about Racism. Penguin.
Downie, Gord and Lemire, Jeff (2016). Secret Path. Arts and Crafts, 2016, Canada.
Ecolint institute of teaching and learning. PGCE (International) (Durham University). Available from https://www.ecolint-institute.ch/flagship/post-graduate-certificate-education-international [18 April 2021]
Our Guiding Statements. Ecolint (2021)
Engel, Rachel (2020) An Open Letter to the International School Community: Our Role in the Black Lives Matter. Available from: https://medium.com/@rachel.engel/an-open-letter-to-the-international-school-community-our-role-in-the-black-lives-matter-movement-c92ba725d93c [18 April 2021]
Futurelearn.com. n.d. Decolonising Education: Implications for global education policy. University of Bristol. Available from: https://www.futurelearn.com/info/courses/decolonising-education-from-theory-to-practice/0/steps/189817 . [18 April 2021]
Gates, Bill. (4 August 2020) COVID-19 is awful. Climate change could be worse. Available from: https://www.gatesnotes.com/Energy/Climate-and-COVID-19
Global Slavery Index. Available at: https://www.globalslaveryindex.org . Accessed 21 June 2021.
Hamayed, O. and de Wilde, C (2012) Ecolint — A History of the International School of Geneva. Geneva, Ecole Internationale de Genève.
https://www.ibo.org/about-the-ib/ [18 April 2021]
Hughes, C. (2021) Decolonizing the curriculum. University of the People. Available from: https://www.uopeople.edu/blog/decolonizing-the-curriculum/ [18 April 2021]
Illich, I. (1971). Deschooling Society. Calder and Boyars, London.
Initiatives around the world. Organisation to Decolinise International Schools. Available at: https://odis-initiatives.carrd.co/ . [Accessed 21 June 2021]
International Baccalaureate. N.d. About the IB. Available from: www.ibo.org
International Baccalaureate. N.d. Career Related Programme. Available from https://www.ibo.org/programmes/career-related-programme/
International Baccalaureate. N.d. Middle Years Programme. Available from https://www.ibo.org/programmes/middle-years-programme/ [18 April 2021]
International Baccalaureate. N.d. Primary Years Programme. Available from https://www.ibo.org/programmes/primary-years-programme/
International Baccalaureate. N.d. What is the Diploma Programme? Available from https://www.ibo.org/programmes/diploma-programme/what-is-the-dp/ [18 April 2021]
IPCC. N. D. IPCC Special Report. [18 April 2021]
IUCN CEC. N.d. IUCN Commission on Education and Communication. Available at https://www.iucn.org/commissions/commission-education-and-communication [18 April 2021]
Kennedy, D. Decolonization. (2016) Oxford University Press, Oxford, U.K.
Lewis, A. J. (1981) Education: Bridging Past, Present, and Future. Journal of Thought. Vol. 16. №3, 61–71. Available from www.jstor.org/stable/42588923
M.I.T. (2019) Introduction to the Compassionate Systems Framework in Schools. Available from: https://jwel.mit.edu/assets/document/introduction-compassionate-systems-framework-schools [18 April 2021]
Maathai, W. (2013) in Aguilar, L., Shaw, D. M. P., Quesada-Aguilar (eds). (2013) A. Forests and Gender. IUCN, Switzerland.
McGowan, M. (27 September 2017) ‘‘Schools are a microcosm of society’: the quest to close Australia’s education gap’. In The Guardian (27 September 2017). Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/sep/27/schools-are-a-microcosm-of-society-the-quest-to-close-australias-education-gap . Accessed 21 June 2021 .
Nafukho, F. M. (2006) Ubuntu Wordview: A Traditional African View of Adult Learning in the Workplace. Advances in developing human Resources. Vol. 8, №3. 408–415
Newton, Isaac. “Letter from Sir Isaac Newton to Robert Hooke” (written 1675). Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Retrieved 19 June 2021.
Nhat Hahn, Thich. (2007) For a Future to Be Possible. Parallax Press, California.
Nhat Hahn, Thich. (2013) Love Letter to the Earth. Parallax Press, California.
Nhat Hahn, Thich. (2013) Peace of Mind. Parallax Press, California.
Ord, T. (2020) The Precipice — Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity. Bloomsbury, London.
Pascoe, B. (2018) Dark Emu. Scribe Publications, U.K.
Plumwood, V. (1993) Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. London and New York: Routledge.
Pojman, L. P. (Ed.) (1998) Environmental Ethics, 2nd Edition. Wadsworth, U.K.
Quammen, S. (2014) Ebola — the natural and human history of a deadly virus. Norton, New York.
Robinson, W. I. and Harris, J. Towards A Global Ruling Class? Globalization and the Transnational Capitalist Class Science & Society, Vol. 64, №1, Spring 2000, 11–54. Available from: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40403824?seq=1 [18 April 2021]
Rodriguez-Giovo, Alejandro. (2021) Some facts about Ecolint’s fiction. Available from https://www.ecolint.ch/news/some-facts-about-ecolints-fiction
Science Direct. Structural Violence. Available at https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/social-sciences/structural-violence [Accessed: 19 June 2021]
Tollefson, J. (7 August 2020), ‘Why deforestation and extinctions make pandemics more likely’. In Nature 584, 175–176 (2020). Available at: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02341-1 . [Accessed: 21 June 2021. ]
United Nations. N.d Sustainable Development Goals. Available from: https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/peace-justice/ [Accessed 21 June 2021]
United Nations. N.D. International Decades. Available from: https://www.un.org/en/observances/international-decades . [Accessed: 18 April 2021]
United Nations. N.D. United Nations Charter. Chapter 1. Available from: https://www.un.org/en/about-us/un-charter/chapter-1 [Accessed: 18 April 2021]
UNESCO Decade on Indigenous Languages. Available at https://en.unesco.org/news/upcoming-decade-indigenous-languages-2022-2032-focus-indigenous-language-users-human-rights . [Accessed: 19 June 2021]
Wilkins, Jason. 3 Reasons Why You Need to Read ‘Secret Path’ by Gord Downie and Jeff Lemire https://www.brokenfrontier.com/3-reasons-need-read-secret-path-gord-downie-jeff-lemire/October 28, 2016
Williams, Jeremy. (2021). Climate Change is Racist: Race, Privelege and the struggle for climate justice. Icon Books, London.
Wiseman, Ben (21 June 2018) The ABCs of L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+. The New York Times. Available from: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/21/style/lgbtq-gender-language.html [Accessed: 18 April 2021]
Wollstonecraft, M. (1792) A Vindication of the Rights of Women. Penguin, U.K.
Endnotes / References
[i] Hamayed and De Wilde, 2012
[ii] Ibid.
[iii] Ibid.
[iv] Ibid.
[v] Ibid
[vi] Ibid
[vii] Ibid
[viii] Ibid
[ix] C.f. Newton, 1675
[x] Ecolint, 2021 and Rodriguez-Giovo, 2021
[xi] CIS, 2021
[xii] Futurelearn, 2021
[xiii] United Nations Charter
[xiv] United Nations Charter
[xv] United Nations Charter
[xvi] United Nations Sustainable Development Goals
[xvii] UNDP Sustainable Development Goals
[xviii] United Nations International Decades
[xix] Definition of ‘Colonialism’ according to Lexico.com, accessed 19 June 2021
[xx] Kennedy, p2.
[xxi] Kennedy
[xxii] See Science Direct for more on this term.
[xxiii] CNN, 2021
[xxiv] Kennedy p.57
[xxv] Downie, Gord in liner notes to Downie and Lemire, 2016.
[xxvi] Wilkins, 2016
[xxvii] Chambers Dictionary, see entry on ‘colony’
[xxviii] See, for example, the Global Slavery Index.
[xxix] One of the most recent publications on this issue at a global scale is Williams, 2021.
[xxx] Wollstonecraft, 1792
[xxxi] Plumwood, 1993
[xxxii] Wiseman, 2018
[xxxiii] Ord, 2020
[xxxiv] UNEP, 2021
[xxxv] Illich, 1971
[xxxvi] Tollefson, 2020
[xxxvii] Ord, 2020
[xxxviii] See for example: https://odis-initiatives.carrd.co/
[xxxix] Pascoe, 2018 back cover
[xl] Pascoe, 2018 p.
[xli] See, for example, Carey (2014), Pascoe: 2018
[xlii] UNESCO Decade on Indigenous Languages.
[xliii] C.f. Hughes, 2021.
