Unveiling the Hidden Curriculum in Conflict Resolution and Peace Education: Future Directions toward a Critical Conflict Education and 'Conflict' Pedagogy

This report offers a brief summary of a master thesis that had the purpose to study the way conflict management educators write and think about "conflict." Using a critical discourse analysis (a la Foucault) of 22 conflict resolution manuals for adults and children (U.S., Canadian, Australian), and using a selected sample of those most available to teachers and facilitators, the author asks the question "what is the best conflict education that is required for youth and adults to live in a world of a 'culture of violence' in the 21st century?" The specific purpose of the study was to provide a poststructuralist critique of conflict management texts/discourses re: the conceptualizations of 'conflict' itself. The study found that the texts/discourses were highly ideologically biased toward consensus theory, unity and harmony, cooperation, pragmatism and a general conservative politics based in psychological individualism (and social psychology). Thus, there is a "hidden curriculum" that ends up more like propaganda than good quality elicitive education, according to the author of the report. The author offers alternative discourses to"balance" the dominant discourses, adding a conflict perspective, critical pedagogy perspective and post-colonial approaches to conflict that might be useful. The author recommends some theoretical foundations (and future research paths) for building an alternative he calls critical "conflict" pedagogy and/or critical conflict education. (Contains 1 figure and 30 end notes).