Felicitation:

UNESCO prize for peace education 2006

Jayantha Senevirathna

ACHIEVEMENT: By winning the much-coveted 2006 UNESCO Prize for Peace Education, Judge Christopher Gregory Weeramantry has brought fame to Sri Lanka.

His forte, peace education, not only opens new vistas for us to think critically, but also aims not to reproduce but to transform the society for the better.

Peace education relies on families, communities, and social networks to affect positive and lasting changes but doesn't advocate breaking the local mindset to go into the future. It dwells on the theme "think globally, act locally." Peace Education teaches us to respect different cultures, religions and civilizations, and is central to educating for a culture of peace. Confucius muses on education centuries ago:

When knowledge is extended
The will becomes sincere
When the will is sincere
The mind is correct
When the mind is correct
The self is cultivated
When the self is cultivated
The clan is harmonized
When the clan is harmonized
The country is well governed
When the country is well governed
There will be peace throughout the land.

The above is a piece of Confucius's "Great Learning." It's exactly what modern day peace education advocates are addressing to.

Judge C. G. Weeramantry stresses the point that science has immensely extended the frontiers of human understanding. It assures a world of comfort for all. Political organizations promote a world of peace to all.

Centuries of civilization have given us a culture that gives us an enlightened life, and the sacrifice of tens of billions of lives in various world wars had given us the background to a world of compassion.

Further, an international law gives us a world of justice for all. "But we are floundering in the midst of all this wealth of opportunities and all this abundance of riches, which we should have been able quite easily to banish from the human community throughout the world.

About the way the world spends, on one estimate $ 780 billion spent on arms. But one tenth of the 80 billion dollars required to provide education, prevent AIDs and supply pure water is difficult to find. It's not available," the 2006 UNESCO Peace Education prizewinner laments.

"Has the world really become wiser and older? Is the humanity far superior? Is the man proper study of mankind? " He questions. It is clear that there is something wrong somewhere.

Ten times of this amount of money for purposes of destruction is easy to find but one tenth of this amount for all these useful purposes is impossible.

When we think of what is wrong, we will find that various parts of the world community has grown up in isolated compartments seeing very little of each other's traditions, cultures, problems and needs.

Therefore, not rising to the level of a world community that is able to do something constructive towards the humanity.

Scientists believe the man is a lucky accident living in this universe. The universe is 13 billion years old. The earth, our abode, is only 4 billion years old.

The man, as a separate species is only 200,000 years old. And, when compared with the universe, the earth is just a speck of dust. Humanity is not the zenith of creation.

According to biblical evidence, the world is only a few thousand years old. The world was seen as a flat terrain few hundred years ago. Therefore, the idea that the man is the supreme is just snobbery. But man can take part in all those intellectual endevours as and explorer and a gatherer of knowledge.

Scientific insights have come by way of falling apples and rattling kettles, but not by grand philosophical questions.

Judge Christopher Gregory Weeramantry quotes Ravindranath Thagore to add some depth to his musings. "The world today is wild with the delirium of hatred, and the path to a solution is tangled with bonds of greed, "is a beautiful description of what the world situation today at the present moment.

Greed and lack of perspective seem to be further factors that prevent our being able to solve our problems. So we deserve his compartmental allegation to the point as we see problems only from our own point of view.