ABSTRACT
In the past year, events in every continent have brought home to us again the horrifying and painful consequences of human hatred, as this is mobilized around ethnic and national divisions. Even as we begin a new millennium with all of the talk about globalization, it feels as if we are awash in such bitter conflicts: Bosnia, Northern Ireland, Indonesia, Turkey, Iraq, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Fiji, the Russian republics, and Israel, to name but a few of them. To these struggles we can add the internal forms of division and hatred in relatively homogeneous societies-ones in which people are hurt and brutalized because of their race, language, gender, disability, religion, sexual identity, and migrant status. In a world with so many hate-filled social conflicts, what might it mean to talk about an education that attempts to teach for a more peaceful, less violent, civic, and global culture? What do we know about the practice of such teaching? Can such an education alter the alltoo-frequent human tendency toward demonizing, dehumanizing, and brutalizing the other? On the edge of the new millenium, it is hard to imagine a more important task than the struggle for what Jewish tradition calls Tikkun Olam-the repair and healing of our world.
