WeDoPeace CIRCLES: Introducing PeaceSkills101

By Sharon L Ernst and Walter W Sylvester

We believe that violence is the failure of knowing how to do peace - not having learned the skills of doing peace results in our having to rely on violence to satisfy our needs and to resolve our disputes with others. The only way to permanently curb our culture's reliance upon violence is to improve our school systems by adding a new PreK-12 parallel track for learning the basic peace skills to our existing track of academic ABCs. Skills4Peace is a set of formative, responsive and restorative peace skills ranging from Mindfulness to Restorative Practices which will empower us all to resolve our disputes and differences across all sectors of our society without the need to resort to acts of violence. Skills4Peace also advocates for schools to adopt two types of pro-active programs - one to train all students, teachers and school personnel in how to spot the signs of mental instability; and the other to teach all students about their rights and responsibilities under our form of Constitutional Government and how our criminal justice system works and how it can affect them. Once these students have mastered their peace skills they will allow their schools to replace old and failed zero-tolerance discipline programs known as the "school to prison pipeline" with student - manned restorative justice based discipline programs using their newly learned peace skills for doing "peer" peace circles and community conferencing. Upon graduation, they will become part of a steadily growing population of citizens who mastered Skills4Peace in school and will be employing these peace skills in all sectors of our society irreversibly transforming our present-day culture of violence into a restorative one of non-violence as they replace us - the last of the violent generations - in the process.For those of us who are not in school we have created an online survey course at skills4peace.com or skills4peace.academy entitled "PeaceSkills101". This online course provides an overview of the components of Skills4Peace as a guide for those who want to learn them thru self-study using resources that the course provides and also those that it recommends which are available online.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1548853070
• ISBN13: 9781548853075
• Release Date: September 2018
• Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
• Length: 212 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.5" x 8.5"