ABSTRACT
This chapter shows a central problem of our time and suggests how education in its formal and informal dimensions can help to solve it. The problem is the absence of peace and security - within families, within communities, within nations, within the world community. A partial cause of this condition are those stresses Walter Leirman referred to in his opening address - which in the two decades since the establishment of the adult education training program at Leuven, have produced a world of increasing danger and insecurity at all levels. Internationally, the twin spectres of a nuclear inferno and a subsequent nuclear winter have haunted with an ever increasing intensity. Peacemaking can be an amateur activity in one’s personal life within one’s family, neighborhood, or workplace. The capacity to mediate and negotiate disputes among family members, between different racial and linguistic groups, and in the workplace, would decrease the considerable social and economic costs of such conflict.
