• Each learner can feel physically and psychologically free from threats and danger and can find opportunities to work and learn with others for the mutual achievement of all.
  
• The diversity of the school's population is respected and celebrated.

Conflict resolution programs can help schools promote both the individual behavioral change necessary for responsible citizenship and the systemic change necessary for a safe learning environment.

Responsible Citizenship

The ability to resolve disputes effectively and nonviolently is central to the peaceful expression of human rights. Conflict resolution can be viewed as a responsibility of law-abiding members of our society. Responsible citizens in a democracy express their concerns peacefully and seek resolutions to problems that take into account common interests and recognize the human dignity of all involved.

Schools can be places where children learn to live in civil association with one another and prepare to assume their future roles as parents, as community members and leaders, and as productive members of the workforce. Conflict resolution skills are essential to public life in schools, communities, and workplaces. These skills encompass more than a set of complex problem-solving processes. The ability to resolve larger issues depends, at least to some extent, on how people deal with each other daily. Building effective relationships among citizens is important not just for reaching agreements, but for shaping how people choose to disagree.

Education can be turned into a force for reducing intergroup conflict. It can emphasize common characteristics and goals and can broaden our understanding of diverse cultures, even in circumstances of conflict. The question is whether human beings can develop a constructive orientation toward those outside their group while maintaining the values of group allegiance and identity. It seems reasonable to believe that, in spite of very bad habits from the past and very bad models in the present, we can indeed learn new habits of mind: "It is not too late for a paradigm shift in our outlook toward human conflict. Perhaps it is something like learning that the earth is not flat. Such a shift in child development and education . . . might at long last make it possible for human groups to learn to live together in peace and mutual benefit."

Many conflicts in schools arise out of differences. Cultural conflicts are based on differences in national origin or ethnicity. Social conflicts are based on differences in gender, sexual orientation, class, and physical and mental abilities. Personal and institutional reactions to differences often take the form of prejudice, discrimination, harassment, and even hate crimes. These conflicts are complex because they are rooted not only in prejudice and discrimination related to cultural and social differences but also in the resulting structures and relationships of inequality and privilege. Conflict resolution education programs provide a framework for addressing these problems. The programs promote respect and acceptance through new ways of communicating and understanding.

Conflict resolution education offers schools strategies for responding affirmatively to the following questions:

• Do members of school communities possess the skills and knowledge to create an environment in which diversity thrives and in which tolerance of differences is encouraged_
  
  
• Do members share a cultivated willingness to accept the inevitable conflict that arises from differing values and cultures within the school community_
  
  
• Are the participants in the school community convinced that conflict is an opportunity for growth, self-awareness, and development of understanding and respect for others_
  
  
• Do the participants in the school community articulate a shared vision that conflicts are inevitable and that they enrich and strengthen school communities_
  
  
• Young people must be challenged to believe and to act on the understanding that a nonviolent, multicultural society is a desirable, realistic goal.