Today, on the International Day of Non-Violence, we "commemorate the philosophy of... Mahatma Gandhi, who through his example proved that peaceful protests could accomplish much more than military aggression." - UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.
Τετάρτη 1 Οκτωβρίου 2014
Σάββατο 25 Ιανουαρίου 2014
Gandhi’s legacy lives on
Gandhi’s legacy lives on
From Rabindranath Tagore to Mohandas Gandhi to Amartya Sen, great Indian minds have addressed the necessity of holistic education for peace and personal development. This century-long legacy is reflected in the goals of a new UNESCO Institute.
The Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Education for
Peace and Sustainable Development (MGIEP), to be inaugurated in New
Delhi later this year, will be the latest in a long line of initiatives
reminding us that Gandhi’s legacy endures.
“If we are to reach real peace in this world and if
we are to carry on a real war against war, we shall have to begin with
children”. These words were taken to heart by the two followers of
India’s Bapu (“Father”) who founded City Montessori School – recipient
of UNESCO’s 2002 Prize for Peace Education – which stands as one of many
incarnations of the Mahatma’s words: the school’s core philosophy is to
make “a good human being, a good member of a family, a good member of a
community, a good citizen of a country, a good citizen of the world”
out of their pupils via the broadest possible education for tolerance
and peace.
Children are also at the centre of programmes such
as the “Peace across borders” art workshops which brought together
children from India, Bangladesh and Pakistan in the summer of 2011 to
paint a peace mural based on the poems of Rabindranath Tagore and Faiz
Ahmad Faiz, in the framework of the UNESCO “Rabindranath Tagore, Pablo
Neruda, Aimé Césaire: for a reconciled universal” programme.
Gandhi believed that “poverty is the worst kind of
violence” – and numerous ongoing education programmes will be essential
to helping millions of Indians out of poverty. The Indian government has
launched Saakshar Bharat, a five-year flagship literacy programme for
70 million non-literates, the majority of them women. Similarly, many
Indian NGOs have pioneered innovative approaches. The Barefoot College
in Tilonia, a UNESCO partner, the only school in the world open only to
people without any formal education, is explicitly founded on Gandhi’s
philosophy of service and sustainability. Nirantar, a women’s
organization in Uttar Pradesh, won a UNESCO King Sejong Literacy Prize
for its rural fortnightly newspaper produced by low caste women and
distributed to more than 20,000 newly literate readers.
According to the Education for All Global Monitoring
Report 2010, although India is still some way from reaching all six EFA
goals, it has a high chance of achieving Universal Primary Education
(UPE) as well as gender parity in primary education by 2015.
It is fitting that an institution placed under the
aegis of Mahatma Gandhi should embody the core values he taught and
lived by: respect for human rights; equality; tolerance; peaceful
exchange and understanding; autonomy; self-empowerment; a more balanced
relationship with the environment.
With powerful backing and an extensive mandate, the
Institute will carry Gandhi’s legacy forward, leading the new
generations along the way.
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