Dear UWCSEA Community,

As the world watches the events in Ukraine unfold and sees the beginning of another humanitarian crisis, it would be easy to write to our community with worthy words of solidarity and hope. But at UWC our drive towards peace goes beyond words, so today I write to share with you some of the actions we take that ensure we are making education a force to unite people for peace.

For many years, Russian and Ukrainian students have lived and studied side-by-side at UWCs across the world, and that is the great connection at the heart of our mission. Last Thursday evening in our boarding houses, the community came together to share thoughts and reflections; all students, whatever their nationality or belief system, could join in conversation and dialogue, with a goal of mutual understanding and acceptance. These conversations are being replicated in many of our classrooms, and teachers are being reminded of tools they can use to support students. Our students understand that to create peace we must know people just as well as we know ideologies.

As our diverse community creates opportunities for students to know each other, we also have a responsibility to explicitly teach peacebuilding to our students, as critical to the foundations of a healthy society. There are elements of peace education in our Personal and Social Education curriculum, and conceptual understandings related to peace in our humanities subjects throughout the Primary, Middle and High Schools. It’s also built into our Service curriculum, and anywhere that students learn about Sustainability. Through these interactions, students learn that peace is not just an absence of conflict, but spans concepts such as social justice, equality, and human rights. 

As they continue to develop their understanding of peace, students also learn how to promote peace in their communities, through their behaviours and actions. This culminates for many students in the Initiative for Peace (IfP) programme in High School, which began in 2001 and involves our students facilitating a multi-day peace conference for young people from different sides of a conflict. The end goal is to inspire the participants to continue with the work of reconciliation after the conference, using their new knowledge and appreciation of both sides of a conflict. Earlier this year, we were proud to launch our IfP Toolkit in honour of our 50th anniversary, which helps other schools and communities around the world to build on our learning and deliver IfP conferences in their own regions. This programme helps our students to know that peacebuilding is possible as well as necessary, and our partnership with the Asia Peace Programme at NUS gives them further opportunities to engage in the study of peace.

Our role at UWC is to use education as a force to unite people, so we will be supporting students in engaging in dialogue, not about the rights or wrongs of specific situations in isolation, but about the mission and values of our community and how these might guide our perspectives and our actions. How we speak about what is currently happening in the world, not just in Ukraine but in so many areas of conflict, shapes our reality. It is important that the information we absorb and the language we use allows for the complexity of the options before us.

Former UWC President Nelson Mandela: “No one is born hating another person because of the colour of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.”

Worthy words, for sure, and at UWC they are supported with deliberate actions in support of peace.

Yours sincerely,

Carma Elliot CMG OBE
College President