Teachers advised to play supportive roles in educating youth about religious tolerance
The Executive Director of the West Africa Network for Peace building (WANEP), Mr Chukwuemeka B. Eze, has advised teachers to play supportive roles in educating the youth about religious tolerance and peaceful coexistence.
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He described education as the cornerstone in the peace building process, stressing that schools held the power to shape the attitudes and skills of young people to build peaceful human relations.
Mr Eze, who was addressing participants at a two-day workshop on religious tolerance in schools, said education played a key role in teaching , conflict resolution, solidarity and global citizenship.
He added, “Education also forms an important part of a person’s life because it enables the individual to gain the needed skills to face life situations.”
“Through teaching of young children values of respect, tolerance and empathy and by equipping them with the necessary skills to resolve conflict in a non-violent manner, they are provided with the tools they need now and in the future to foster peaceful relations at home, at school and around the world,” he said.
Objective
The two-day dialogue, organised by WANEP, in collaboration with the National Peace Council (NPC), was to identify and examine the factors contributing to the seeming and increasing religious intolerance in schools in Ghana.
It also discussed issues and priorities for preventive peace building process.
The workshop was a follow-up to an earlier stakeholders conference on religious tolerance that took place at the Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training Centre and was attended by heads of schools and other stakeholders drawn from all the 10 regions of the country.
Role of education
According to Mr Eze, the role of education is essential to the promotion of a culture of peace inn the society “which is made of people, groups and communities”.
He thus called on the heads of the religious educational institutions and other stakeholders in the peace building process to adopt dialogue in resolving what he described as“the creeping religious intolerance in the educational system, since dialogue raises people’s awareness and deflates seemingly hard-to-solve problems”.
He said the dialogue presented a unique opportunity for knowledge sharing in terms of the challenges and ideas on how to address them.
Background
Explaining the rationale behind the dialogue, the Secretary to the NPC, Mr George Amoh, said the re-emergence of faith and religious beliefs at the heart of contemporary conflicts fuelled by politics, ethnicity and parochialism was a challenging and worrisome development for all conflict analysts and practitioners.
According to him, religious beliefs are not only exploited in school, conflicts situations or during large-scale society crises “but it also genuinely drives war and in some instances is regarded as the underlying value and currency that stimulates most conflicts”.
The dialogue was, therefore, to find ways on how to use education to inculcate religious tolerance in students at a tender age so as to shape them to be part of the peace building process in the future.