SOME EFFECTS OF TEACHING ADOLESCENTS SOME CREATIVE, PEACEFUL CONFLICT RESOLUTION APPROACHES.

An interdisciplinary repertoire of twenty-seven creative, peaceful approaches for dealing with international and other conflict is presented-the longest one in print. Educators are urged to diffuse it, and to use it to convince students of the virtual inexhaustibility of peaceful ways of dealing with conflict. The article differentiates curriculum based on the repertoire from other social studies curricula. A study is reported in which four of the creative, peaceful approaches were taught for three weeks to high school seniors typical of "Middle-Americans ." The most interesting result was that a great many of the closed-minded students (in the Rokeach sense) openly accepted the approaches and independently used them in their own lives. Though these students remained categorical thinkers, the number of categories on which they could act was increased. As one student put it, "There are many ways to compromise." Although these students continued to distrust adversaries, the approaches identified ways to find common interests for which an opponent could be trusted to work. The study suggests that it is easier to make closed-minded people more peaceful by teaching them many specific methods for resolving conflict than to try to reverse their closed-mindedness or make them more amicable, because these are stable qualities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]