Cultivating a Peace Culture in school
- Clarence Shettlesworth
- Oct 6, 2024
- 1 min read
Updated: Oct 7, 2024
There is a need to cultivate a culture of peace, where people treat one another with respect, kindness and are
ready to help one another rather than take advantage of the other. A school was chosen to cultivate this
culture of peace.

CMIRC acted as the local partner for a Global Grant in collaboration with the Rotary Club of Bangkok and clubs in Taiwan. The Cooperating Partner was the Peace Culture Foundation led by Psychologist and Rotary Peace Fellow Dr. Sombat Tapanya.
COVID disrupted the project but it was completed with Year 1 concentrating on eliminating violence in school, year 2 in cultivating a peace culture and year 3 in training future leaders.
A primary school, with 180 ethnic Shan children, whose parents are migrants and where
children have a high percentage of being unruly and lack discipline, even to study. Under the
program, children will be taught how to respect others, teachers are taught to respect the rights of students, and
change their approach towards discipline, and parents will be taught that there are other
ways to get children to obey than by shouting at them, or hitting them or through corporal punishment. In this 3year project, attempts will be made also through marital arts like Aikido to give the children self confidence and
inner discipline, and finally they will pay attention to study.
The program includes baseline evaluation to assess
current situation at the target site. The intervention programs will be aimed largely towards reducing violence
and cultivating peace culture. Activities will be designed based on the evaluation results. Training programs will
be scheduled throughout the three years with annual evaluation and final evaluation at the end of three years.
Ban San Pakwan school in Hang Dong district of Chiangmai is the beneficiary school. We have recieved
enthusiastic responses from the principal and teachers. It is a small elementary school in the rural area where
most of the students are from Shan workers families with low income. Classes range from kindergarten for
preschoolers and grades one to six.
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