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Betty Reardon


Betty A. Reardon (born 12 June 1929) is the founder and director of the Peace Education Center and Peace Education Graduate Degree Program at Teachers College, Columbia University. She is a leader in peace education and a scholar in human rights education at the primary and secondary levels. Along with Elise Boulding and Cynthia Enloe, she is also considered part of the "pioneering generation of women in peace studies" because of her efforts to highlight the dominance of "white haired wise men" in the field, and her desire to make women’s ideas and issues a central part of the debate on world peace. Her publications comprise over 300 works in a number of subject areas including: peace studies, peace education, human rights, gender, and ecology.

Reardon founded the International Institute on Peace Education (IIPE) which has held conferences in sixteen countries, with educators coming from approximately one hundred countries. The significance of the IIPE was cited by UNESCO in a special honorary mention at the Peace Education Prize ceremony in 2002. Reardon’s work for key institutions, and her writings, have defined the field of peace education, and resulted in her holding numerous prominent roles such as: the Honorary Co-chair of Peace and Justice Studies Association's Advisory Committee; the Academic Coordinator of the Peace Education Professional Development Certificate Program at Teachers College-Tokyo Campus; the School Program Director at the Institute for World Order; and the President of International Jury for the UNESCO Prize for Peace Education. She also holds a Doctorate in Education from Teachers College, Columbia University, an MA in history from New York University, and a BA in history from Wheaton College.

In her view, peace education is vitally important. In a chapter of her book, Human Rights Education as Education for Peace, she writes about the development of peace education, but she also says that "peace education as such is less visible in American secondary and elementary schools than ... other approaches" to peace; and that "only a small fraction of university students ever pursue courses in peace studies." This leads to her discussion of human rights education which, she says, "comprehends some of the same normative goals espoused by peace" but while it is "certainly necessary, it is far from sufficient and fails to exploit the essential contribution that human rights can make to peace education." As a result, she argues that "the conceptual core of peace education is violence, it's control, reduction, and elimination", while the "conceptual core of human rights education is human dignity, its recognition, fulfillment, and universalization." In this chapter, she also argues that: "each and all approaches to peace education can make a significant contribution to...the development of judgement making capacities through the integration of human rights content and perspectives."


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