Peace Education
How We Come to Love and Hate War

An approach to peace education designed to help students understand the psychological factors that push people into war and violence.

Nel Noddings (Author)

9781107658721, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 14 November 2011

190 pages
21.6 x 14 x 1.2 cm, 0.27 kg

"...The book as a whole proposes a variety of ideas.... offers information that will educate the reader. These involve the centrality of war in history, the destructiveness of war, masculinity, patriotism, hatred, religion, pacifism, women, and existential meaning..."
–Dr. Rachel MacNair, Institute for Integrated Social Analysis (Consistent Life), PsycCRITIQUES

There is a huge volume of work on war and its causes, most of which treats its political and economic roots. In Peace Education: How We Come to Love and Hate War, Nel Noddings explores the psychological factors that support war: nationalism, hatred, delight in spectacles, masculinity, religious extremism and the search for existential meaning. She argues that while schools can do little to reduce the economic and political causes, they can do much to moderate the psychological factors that promote violence by helping students understand the forces that manipulate them.

1. The centrality of war in history
2. Destruction
3. Masculinity and the warrior
4. Patriotism
5. Hatred
6. Religion
7. Pacifism
8. Women and war
9. Existential meaning
10. The challenge to education.

Subject Areas: Educational psychology [JNC], Social, group or collective psychology [JMH], Child & developmental psychology [JMC], Peace studies & conflict resolution [GTJ], Communication studies [GTC]