From a vantage point early in the 1970s it seems a bit futile to forecast proposals for the decade.¹ Programs for the 1970s should have as their long-range targets not this decade but the next century. Perhaps farsighted programs will help avoid the fruitless kinds of incremental and fragmented change that has characterized the past two decades of American education. Given the current trend projections, educational needs, and various other societal problems, it is evident that drastic changes in educational policy are required. Without such changes we cannot expect the school system itself to survive, much less make any significant contribution to the change of any other system or, indeed, to the survival of mankind. It is that survival crisis which programs for the 1970s must face as the key issue in goal formation and strategy planning. It is therefore imperative that survival education become the core of all programs.

The first requisite of survival is peace, a state of order in which tensions and conflicts can be resolved without destruction or lethal violence. (Note: peace need not be the absence of tension or conflict but only the nonviolent management of these phenomena.) Educational programs must therefore be concerned with defining and achieving such an order to assure survival in all realms of human experience—as part of a species, or mankind; as members of groups and subgroups, or societies; and as human beings, or individuals.

As we inquire into the definitions and strategies for achievement of the desired order, we must recognize not only the interrelationships among these realms of experience but also the uniqueness of each and the distinctions among them. We cannot, for example, expect world peace to provide “inner peace” for every human being (the ability to handle personal and internal conflicts) any more than we can expect to achieve world peace by gradually bringing “peace of soul” to each member of the human species. Nor can we expect a nonviolent or even a ‘just’ order among nations to resolve all the varied and complex tensions existing within and among other levels of human social organization. We should, however, recognize that some of these domestic and personal tensions do in fact result from the stresses imposed by the “war system” which characterizes present world politics and that any attempt to eliminate them must include efforts to replace that system with a “peace system,” a form of politics which reduces and attempts to eliminate organized violence.

Helping to bring such a system into existence should be a primary goal of educational programs in the 1970s. Anything less would be an inadequate response to the petitions of the young reflected in the data in Chap. 4, “Let’s Listen to Our Children and Youth.” Such a goal requires an education that inquires into three realms of human experience: into social and political structures and processes, with an eye toward understanding and managing institutions and deriving strategies for nonviolent change needed for species survival; into modes to express ideas, feelings, and interpretations of proposed changes, aiming at the kind of exchange among and within groups that will result in intelligent policy formation; and into individual moral growth, intellectual development, and ways of making both personal and political choices on the basis of sound value judgments.

A more comprehensive description of these goals was presented in the Asilomar “Statement of Objectives and Approaches for Improvement of the Social Studies.” For the purposes of this chapter, as you read the statement, reproduced below, simply substitute ‘education’ at each mention of “social studies”.

The purpose of the social studies is to educate students toward the development of a world m which all human beings may live in dignity. The goals of learning should be construction of a future world system in which all human persons enjoy material well-being, the benefits of education, access to information, freedom from oppression and violence, participation in making the decisions which affect their lives, and a respectful, nourishing, and fulfilling relationship with all forms of life and their environment.

Learning experiences should be designed to help students understand the processes and causes of change through the careful analysis of all available data. It is imperative that learning experiences equip the learner with the ability to participate effectively in the process of change. This approach should foster the development of a value system which accords human dignity to all persons and produces empathy with and compassion for other humans of diverse cultures, both in their own countries and in other parts of the world.

The social studies, through social and behavioral sciences and the humanities, should introduce several basic concepts to students of all nations and all cultures. These concepts include the notion that mankind is a single species with basic common needs and that the world is a global system incorporating many human cultures and subsystems. Human and cultural differences should be studied and appreciated as varieties of the total human experience.

Students should be able to recognize and define problems, to gather and apply data in order to understand problems, to conceptualize and plan solutions, to evaluate various plans according to a value system which encourages commitment to action. Students possessing such skills may use them to build a world system in which human life is valued above institutions, freedom as valued above political ideology, and justice is valued above order.

Learning experiences should provide the child with opportunities to select subjects and modes of study and encourage his personal participation in the learning process. Children must be helped to understand themselves and others and permitted to discuss and reflect upon the nature of self and of other selves, such reflections being vital to the child’s ability to build his own learning structures and to become a reflective evaluator of his own learning. Content should be based upon the realities of the life of the child, his community, and world society. Controversy, conflict, and serious problems must be as much a part of the child’s in-school learning as they are of his out-of-school learning.

Such education implies the need to overcome unnecessary barriers among the disciplines and to create and use knowledge in a way which will contribute to the realization of the desired future world system. The creation and use of such knowledge should encourage the development of the highest levels of cognition, which can produce the kind of affective learning experiences which lead to changes in behavior and to desired social change.²

The question for educators proceeding from the statement above is: What kinds of projects and programs can carry out its purposes? Fortunately there are many possibilities within the growing survival-curriculum movement and also in projects dealing with social issues and human development. Many of these projects have an admitted crisis orientation, an orientation which, far from being a hysterical approach, is a pragmatic one. The common orientation is crisis-centered rather than problem-centered because there is a general recognition that our present structures and processes for problem solution are inadequate to meet the current situation. In fact, what differentiates a ‘crisis’ from a ‘problem’ is the inability of the established institutions to deal with the former. A second common characteristic of this growing group of ‘survivalists’ is the search for unprecedented solutions and the concomitant assumption that such solutions will probably require new and radically different institutions, an idea described by Michael Scriven as “survival through revolution.”³

Scriven was, in fact, the first to put forth a suggestive outline for a survival curriculum which must be developed to replace the “war curriculum” described by Thornton B. Monez in Chap. 2 of this book. Other notable contributions on the relationship between education and survival, together with suggestions for curricular and pedagogical approaches, have been made by William H. Boyer, of the University of Hawaii⁴, and Fannie R. Shaftel, of Stanford University.⁵ Although these researchers carry out their work in the tradition of social reconstruction, their writings call for an activist commitment and, indeed, tend to be more revolutionary than reformist in that they document the need for immediate and drastic changes in educational organization and practice.

It is the thesis of this chapter that, while there is a general recognition of the need for educational change of revolutionary proportions, there has been no systematic general diagnosis from which we may project a comprehensive vision of change and design strategies for bringing the vision into reality. Criticism and problems are dealt with separately (if at all), and consequently little or no headway is made toward meeting the real needs of the schools. We must recognize that education is in a systems crisis and requires a drastic system change, a revolutionary approach to meet that crisis.

When we try to sum up all that has been said in the critiques and studies of the schools, the problem of reaching a diagnosis is not so difficult to resolve. Let me posit one possible general diagnosis as a basis for some of the programs to be recommended for the 1970s. The schools are a barometer of the society, revealing ‘the stresses it suffers, demonstrating the gap it exhibits between articulated and manifested values, and shaking with the trauma of recognizing the need for change but having no clear and comprehensive vision of what form that change should take. In short, the schools, like most other aspects of society, are oppressive in their atmosphere, product-oriented in their processes, past- and content-oriented in their teaching methods, and hierarchical and elitist in their organization.

For example, the tendency to classify and categorize young people not only in age groups but also in so-called ability groups, and thereby to separate some groups from other groups, undoubtedly contributes to the polarization which afflicts our society. (It is easy enough for the educators to decry the attacks of hard-hat hawkish laborers on the dove demonstrations of students, but they might well recognize that the world view and value system of that group of hard hats were profoundly influenced when they were separated into a ‘nonacademic’ course in secondary school or, even worse, were consigned at a young age to groups with reading or language difficulties, which we know now to be large part culturally determined.)

At best, the schools’ mode of organization and operation is inefficient, and at worst, it is inhumane. Ranging from Silberman, to Denisson, to Leonard, to Rossman, to Goodman, to Firestone, and the feminists, the charge is pretty well documented that delight, exuberance, excitement at the adventure of life, and joy in learning have no place in most American schools.

A prescription that would follow from such a diagnosis would include a new school system which is anti-elitist, person-oriented, inquiry-centered, process-concerned, and future-directed and, God willing, would function in a happy environment in which students could prepare to work toward the survival of mankind on planet earth. In short, a set of conditions should prevail m the schools which peace researchers now refer to as “positive peace,” in which peace can be maintained—that is, “a state of assured justice.”⁶

Without such an environment no curriculum, even one based on survival criteria, will serve the purpose. Let us keep the goals implied in this prescription in mind as we seek out substantive bases for survival curriculums. Such goals, I believe, are implicit in programs now being devised to deal with the issues of environment, population, human rights, economic development and welfare, social justice, and war and peace. One particular area of study which combines elements of such issues and works toward a goal similar to that advocated in the foregoing prescription is “world order.” After more than 10 years of research and development, this topic offers techniques of problem definition, modes of inquiry, and value analysis, as well as particular teaching-learning strategies.

The central concern of the world-order inquiry is peace, a goal described by the discipline as the elimination of organized violence among nations. This central concern with violence has led researchers in the field to see the potential for organized violence arising out of those very problems which individually threaten the survival of man. Working separately in their own regions of the world, but coordinating their efforts through such programs as the World Order Models Project, they have come to see these problems as so closely interrelated that they would be more effectively resolved by integrated programs organized at a world-system level rather than being dealt with as distinct phenomena approached individually by national systems.

World order, therefore, is a comprehensive, integrated, multidisciplinary subject. Researchers have assumed the responsibility of suggesting modes to bring about changes in the world political system to attain the goals of world order. As a result, world order is not merely an academic inquiry into problems of war or peace and survival. It is also a policy science directed at finding viable solutions to those problems. This policy science orientation makes it a highly appropriate substantive base for educational programs designed to equip and motivate students to act for change.

The basic concern for world peace gives rise to the assumption that the most urgently required change—perhaps, in fact, a prerequisite to changes at other levels of human organization—is that which would radically transform the world political structure by replacing the war system with adequate world institutions to make nonviolent resolution of conflicts among nations both possible and probable. Thus supporters of world-order studies advocate that students inquire into the structures and processes of the world political system with a view toward transforming it into a true peace system. World order is, therefore, political education for world citizenship. It is a conscious attempt to politicize students responsibly with regard to world problems in much the same manner as Edmund W. Gordon advocated in regard to national problems of race and social justice and student power in the cogent and moving paper he delivered at Asilomar.⁷

Programs such as those advocated by Gordon and world order educators should have top priorities for the 1970s, not only because of their concern for peace but also because of the related goals espoused as essential to peace—social justice and economic welfare. Such programs would make operational Earl S. Johnson’s definition of the “politicization of social knowledge,” which is “the purposeful turning of thought and action, collectively and individually, toward the realities of our time—war, the rape of nature, racism, hunger.”⁸

World order seeks not only nonviolent solutions to conflicts but, even more important, just