Applying linguistics for peace education

This paper is in three sections. The first one — conceptual essentialism—discusses the philosophical question of essentialism and offers a brief criticism of it. Essentialism is understood here as involving the view that meaning resides in words rather than having it assigned to them by human beings (as is the case with non‐essentialism). The second section — essentialism and politics — attempts to show how essentialism leads to, among other things, intolerance, conceitedness, a sense of power, and eventually war. The final section — education against essentialism — identifies a few sources of essentialism. It also expresses scepticism over the feasibility of education against essentialism in the near future.