The phrase "process arts" refers to the facilitative disciplines like diplomacy, mediation, activism and cultural criticism, community building, consultation, management (organizational development), psychotherapy, etc. that attend the how of friction, creativity, and power at least as much as the what of production and making ideas concrete.
As long as there have been teachers, facilitators, and conversations about virtue there have been clear and compelling appeals to use power for the common good. The field of new vocations we now call "process arts" carries an unshakable obligation, especially in this era of a rising new myth of a worldwide communitarian movement, to access group power to practice peace so that everyone involved has support in meeting their basic needs and at least a chance to blossom fully.
The extension of the process arts into arts of peace, or peace practices, used to be a bit more buried in literal ideas of peace defined as "not in conflict" rather than "working well through conflict", but they have always suggested an education in behaviors that result in being peaceful. They have to be practiced, learned and passed on for peace to be real.
Imagine if our soldiers had an accepted and universally applied "program [that] includes every phase of education, from vocational training to graduate courses in universities" in how to practice peace with as much intensity and dedication as we train our children to destroy each other.
The Arts of Peace
On the rue d Ayen in bedraggled St. Germain, France, stands a bright, pink, three-story schoolhouse. In its library are $25,000 worth of books. Its music room has an electric phonograph and a big collection of classical records. Its basement hums with lathes and its upper floors are alive with the clatter of typewriters and sewing machines. Last week the school awarded its first graduation, certificates—to WACs, for their proficiency in beauty culture.
The St. Germain school is one of the first G.I. schools to be set up under the Army's mammoth post-V-E education program for servicemen & women temporarily stranded in Europe (TIME, Oct. 16). To keep everybody busy, the program includes every phase of education, from vocational training to graduate courses in universities like Cambridge and the Sorbonne. But unit command schools (established by battalions) like St. Germain's form by far the biggest part of the program. By August 1 there will be one such school for every 1,000 soldiers. Every soldier who is not assigned to urgent duty will be required to attend for two hours a day (unless he prefers drill and supervised athletics) until there is enough shipping space to bring him home.
Other phases of the Army education program are now getting under way. British universities are enrolling their first small batches of G.I.s, will soon take many more.
Find this article at: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,797608,00.html
Labels: peace, processarts
| posted by Unknown @ 7/25/2001 12:11:00 PM
