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Education cannot offer immediate remedies to the local and global problems that we see on the news screens every day, but it can contribute to solving them over the longer term. This book examines specifically the contribution that education for learning to live together can make, even in countries where teacher training and classroom resources are limited. Many countries have diverse populations (ethnic, linguistic, religious, etc) and seek to maintain harmony among the different groups. In some countries, however, especially where economic stress or climate change have intensified arguments over resources, tensions have led to armed conflict. This brings with it all the misery of death, injury, displacement and poverty, along with disruption of education systems. In some instances education itself has been a contributory factor to the outbreak of conflict, notably through unequal education opportunities for different groups, and through biased school curricula.

Civil conflict has brought untold suffering in recent years, and in a globalised world it has negative spill-over effects to neighbouring and other countries. It is vital to develop education policies and curricular reforms that can help convey values and skills for learning to live together to young people, to help lessen tensions, within and between countries.

Education policy-makers can help lay the foundations for a better future by adjusting the content and process of education to reflect skills and values for human rights, humanitarian norms, peaceful resolution of conflicts, sustainable development and other issues as elements of local, national and global citizenship.

Education reform is not enough, of course, to resolve the numerous problems of our times. The focus of this volume is on the contribution that can be made through aligning the content of education to the goal of learning to live together. This work will have greater impact when it takes place within education systems and policies that are consistent with human rights values and of course when other sectors besides education make their respective contributions.

This book shows that transformative education for conflict resolution and peace, for local, national and global citizenship, for human rights and humanitarian values can be implemented even under difficult conditions if there is a policy commitment to do so. Authors have provided examples and lessons learned from their own experiences as eminent practitioners in the field.