Combining conflict resolution education and human rights education: thoughts for school-based peace education

Peace education embraces a wide range of programs and initiatives. Two of those subfields, human rights education and conflict resolution education, are often considered too different in goals, models and content to be seen as partners in the same educational effort. A review of recent literature confirms that few conflict resolution education programs include a strong human rights emphasis. And many human rights education programs contain little in the way of conflict resolution education. In this article, I suggest that these types of peace education may be more productively combined than originally thought, especially in school-based and youth-based programs in the United States.