Scholas Occurrentes in The Vatican: Educating for Peace
February 4, 2015
Vatican City
This week, I’ve had the enormous pleasure of being invited to take part in the Fourth Scholas Occurrentes World Congress at the Vatican, a project that bears the seal of Pope Francis. Within the context of this invitation, I also had the honor of being asked to present my book, La guerra: un crimen contra la humanidad (soon to be released in English as War: A Crime Against Humanity), the message of which is in perfect harmony with that of the Scholas mission: the consolidation of peace through education and through acceptance of human diversity.
Scholas Ocurrentes is a worldwide educational network inspired by the Pope with the aim of promoting the linking of schools from all over the world in a huge network. The idea is for a wide variety of learning centers to share their projects and, in doing so, to mutually enrich one another. Although the guiding idea is to create a rich dialogue among schools of all kinds, the project places special focus on providing the kind of help such networks can generate to schools with low resource levels, so as to eventually create education without exclusion.Here in Rome, we’re anxiously awaiting the closing presentation headed by His Holiness, Pope Francis.
Despite the support provided by the Vatican and by the Pontiff himself, this network is not oriented toward only connecting schools found in Christian majority nations. On the contrary, according to José María del Corral, Worldwide Director of Scholas Occurrentes, “The best result to date was for the experiments we did when the Pope was Archbishop of Buenos Aires and we brought together kids from schools with different religions, Jewish schools, and Catholic schools, and Islamic schools…and we tried an experiment that we called ‘neighbors’ schools’. And there they learned what real co-existence was, what different points of view were, different beliefs and projects and they built solutions based on the difficulties they had, like alcohol, drugs, insecurity, violence.”
And this is where the philosophy of my book, War: A Crime Against Humanity, coincides completely with this congress in which I have had the honor of participating. In my essay turned book, I propose that the world can no longer afford to back any policy that includes war. If we can’t find a way to live in peace and devote ourselves to solving in a completely universal way the social and environmental problems that are afflicting us as a planetary family, then we will have to confront the specter of our own extinction as a species. And the only way to achieve the worldwide peace, of which we are so gravely in need, is through education.
The conference in which I am taking part this week addresses the core issue of educating for peace through sports, art and technology, the three pillars of Scholas, which has already morphed into a worldwide network of 400,000 schools. This project also coincides with another one (currently in the planning stages) in which I am working with former Chief Prosecutor for the International Criminal Court, Dr. Luis Moreno Ocampo, through which we eventually hope to achieve the creation of a worldwide network of teachers specializing in peace and justice studies. Through this worldwide network, these educators will share materials and methodologies for teaching peaceful and empathic behavior, so as to create, in the short, medium and long terms, a more peaceful world, and one in which war will be considered a crime against humanity, punishable by law and condemned the world over.
In the coming days, I will continue to write about this magnificent event and, next up, I will have news of Pope Francis’s presentation.
In the meantime, peace be with you.
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