Peace Education at Hope School

Last September, Hope School, represented by; two of its management team, was invited to attend and participate in the WRAP summit which took place in Seoul – South Korea on the 15th, of September 2017. The three day conference has its great impact on the participants from Hope school, who insisted to share the values in their local community. Mr. Saba came up with the idea of finding Peace Education Forum in Palestine to enhance peace values and mitigate violence in schools and local community.

The plan is to start with focus groups in Hope school targeting teachers and students of certain ages and then extending the idea to other schools and non-government organizations in the nearby locations.

The Event: The management team decided to make a peace lesson at Hope school on the 16th, of October, 2017. The program targeted students of grades 10+11 including their teachers. The event includes a video film about education in Japan. 38 students with 4 teachers attended the event which took place in the school chapel. In addition, the event has been joined by Sara and Emili from WRAP through Viber.

The film has 7 basic rules and behaviors to be discussed, most of them have the same content and carries the dimension of one of the 33 values included in the WRAP list of values. The film talks about the “sense of duty” (one of the 33 values) which our children lack and rarely committed to do their work and duties at school or at home.

Mr. Saba briefed a little bit about the Summit in Seoul and the festival in the stadium with hige crowd. He declared that this will be the first step to establish Peace Education Forum in Palestine. He then talked about the duties and commitments of the students in Palestine in comparison of those duties and behaviors of students in Japan. He asked the students to answer which of the seven rules included in the film is so important to them and why? Most of them said the cleaning of the school and their poor role in doing so. Others said the holidays is a sacred issue which they don’t like to interrupt in contrary to what been shown in the film that students in Japan where using holidays for more production and not getting rest. Mr. Saba addressed “task” as a need for the school because we lack of volunteering work and using the holidays like Friday or Saturday are not acceptable. In order to address this need, let us start with dedicating the coming Friday to start our project: How? The students asked. Let us dedicate next Friday to be the first day to come to school in holiday and build our peace education program together. Those who can come on Friday please raise their hands??? 23 students of both gender raised their hands and expressed their willingness to come to school to meet and make some voluntary work.

we think that the started program would have remarkable impact on the attitude of the youngsters who live in a very gloomy economic and political situations.

1. Obviously the students were very happy and attracted to the idea which is so important. The readiness of 23 students to come next Friday is a clear outcome and indicator of success of the meeting.

2. Next TASK: 23 VOLUNTEERS would come to the school on Friday October 20th, 2017 to meet and start our voluntary work at school.

3. Our plan is to invite teacher and limited number of students of three schools in the area in the weekend vacation next month. We will prepare for such event to convince the teachers.