Problem

In South Africa, the post-apartheid school curriculum is far from meeting one of its main objectives: ensuring a caring culture of human rights prevails. Bullying and violence are rife in South Africa’s schools – in the first four months of 2007 over 1000 incidents of alleged abuse and crime were reported at schools in one province alone.

The Gift

This gift will provide one teaching pack for the Desmond Tutu Peace Centre’s ‘Schools for Peace’ program in South Africa. The pack will be used by teachers who have attended Schools for Peace workshops where they are trained in facilitation and mediation so that they may better deal with violence in their schools. They will use the pack materials to teach about peaceful ways to resolve conflict and to engage their students in respectful debate and creative expression. The pack will include school supplies such as blackboard paint and paint brush, stick chalk, blackboard duster, scissors, teacher's diary, ruler, crayons, pencils, paint, glue, sticky tape, colored paper and canvas. The Schools for Peace program is a peace education intervention designed to address the problems of violence and bullying in the country's schools. By giving this gift, you will help contribute to a culture of peace in South Africa by educating teachers and students to let go of fear of 'the other' and instead choose to embrace each other's differences.