Applying the Ultimate Universal Plea: a Nonkilling Proclamation, by Francisco Gomes de Matos
The list below is the first application of the Nonkilling Proclamation found on page 17 of my book
The list is openended, so as to reflect the Nonkilling challenges faced by educators all over the world. In such spirit,you are asked to contribute to it, improve it, refine it, and, above all, apply it to your local educational context. The sequence is the result of my brainstorming, rather than hierarchically conceived.
One of the items in the Nonkilling Proclamation reads:
LET'S NOT KILL EDUCATIONALLY
We kill educationally, when we
- 1) Let forms of oppression, aggression, violence be commited in schools, classrooms;
- 2) deprive human beings of their right to become literate when there are conditions for making that come true;
- 3) exclude students on the basis of gender, age, nationality, linguistic background, spiritual belief, economic condition, culture, cognitive ability;
- 4) violate students' rights as examinees/testees, by testing them in unjust, unfair ways (for instance, by including test items not dealt with in class);
- 5) treat students disrespectfully when they question something we assert;
- 6)"force" students to perform tasks against their will rather than ask if they would like to do so;
- 7) emphasize educational punishment rather than individual development in assessment situations;
- 8) make fun of, ridicule, humiliate students in front of their classmates;
- 9)tell students that they will never succeed in a specific school subject or in a specific profession, for intellectual or other reasons;
- 10) teach that the world is divided, fragmented, an aggregate of countries rather than a unity, a family of nations, a whole, a holistic system of sharing the Earth;
- 11) design and implement poorly-designed-and-tested violence prevention programs in schools;
- 12) simplistically give students the impression that killing is inevitable, unavoidable, instead of making a cogent case for Nonkilling as a needed Universal in Education;
- 13) cause any form of suffering in school contexts;
- 14) narrow or restrictg the concept of problem-solving in the curriculum, rather than extend its range inter-and-transdisciplinarily for humanizing purposes;
- 15) expose students to vocabulary and phraseology that can kill linguistically, rather than to lexicon and expressions that can help dignify their daily dialogues;
- 16) act as DEhumanizers, through the use, in class, of materials that are biased, discriminatory, authoritarian, oppressive, rather than as Humanizers, persons imbued with the ideals of Human Rights, Justice, Peace, Equality, Dignity, Autonomy and who apply such values;
- 17) express the view that conflict is a negative force, rather than a challenging opportunity for constructive understanding and creative conflict resolution;
- 18) fail to anticipate efforts to curb bullying and other forms of violence in school settings (as early as elementary school, for instance);
- 19) teach that War(fare) is necessary to achieve Peace, instead of teaching students to cherish the dignity of Life and to nourish Nonkilling in their interactions;
- 20) fail to fulfill our responsibility to educate imaginatively for the Good of Humankind.
Francisco Gomes de Matos is an applied peace linguist from Recife, Brazil; Co-author of the chapter "Toward a Nonkilling Linguistics" (Toward a Nonkilling Paradigm, Honolulu, 2009), basis of the Course "Nonkilling Linguistics" at Wikiversity's School of Nonkilling Studies. Professor Emeritus, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco; Co-founder and currently President of the Board, Associação Brasil América. He can be reached at fcgm@hotlink.com.br
