African concept of ‘Inochi’: a new paradigm for peace education in the contemporary society

摘要

What should constitute the core of peace education curriculum has become a thorny issue among scholars of peace studies. This controversy has resulted to mottled curricular. Being divided in disciplines, orientations, methodologies and interests, scholars have proposed biological, sociological, philosophical, political, anthropological and traditional approaches to the building curriculum for peace education. These approaches as good as they may be, have not really proffered solution to peace needs of the contemporary society. This is because they emphasize partial and disintegrated aspects of human reality. Thus they fail to touch on the core aspect of existence that is shared by all. Hence they anchor peace education on aspects of peace making, peace keeping, peace enforcing, peace arbitration etc. Notably, these methods fail to yield the expected dividends and the overall consequence has been tension, crisis and avid violation of human and non human members of the world community. It is therefore against this backdrop that this paper proposes a new paradigm for peace education, which emphasizes peace building. It also takes seriously the common factor that is shared by all as the core of peace education. The new approach is centered on ‘Life’ as the nucleus of all existences. This idea is anchored on the African ‘ Inochi’. ‘Inochi’ is a Japanese word for life and its equivalence is ‘ Ndu ’ in Igbo ontology. African Inochi embodies the idea of cosmic unity of all things and all beings. It underscores the sacredness of life and does not see life merely as material. The concept projects the idea of human responsibility, protection and care as it underscores the fact that all lives have a mono-origin. The paper therefore opines that if peace educators shall adopt the Inochi paradigm as the core of peace education curriculum, the ideal new world order of our dream will soon be realized as the conflict and crisis that have created a schizophrenic situation in the minds of global citizens will soon diminish.