Chapter 14: A Peace Education Response To Modernism: Reclaiming the Social and Pedagogical Purposes of Academia

There has rarely been a moment in history when education in America was not declared in a state of emergency. The problems we face in struggling to improve our institutions of learning are confounded by an often misunderstood and/or misguided sense of purpose. If education is in a state of emergency then we have to ask, by what standard is our education being assessed and toward what broader purpose that education is seeking to fulfill for the individual and society?

In asking these questions it is often discovered that the crises we face find their foundations in both systemic problems and in educational policies that might be well-intentioned, yet do not address or meet the needs of a world that is constantly changing. We are rarely aware of the social purposes of the learning we participate in and conduct. Reardon (2002) describes the social purposes of education as “the conditions in society that educational planners and authorities, and, almost always, the societies and governments which employ them, seek to achieve, maintain, influence or change through the schooling they design and deliver” (p. 1). This chapter purports that the social purposes of formal education have become obscured, if not invisible, and have long gone without critical examination. Even more problematic, these purposes are often at odds with the educators that facilitate the learning and are inconsistent with normative societal values they purport to uphold.