Bio:
Dr. Radhi H. Al-Mabuk is a professor of Educational Psychology at the University of Northern
Iowa, a position he has held since 1990. Dr. Al-Mabuk served as the Department Head for four
years and directed the Master Program in Professional Development for teachers for more than a
decade. Currently, Dr. Al-Mabuk serves as the Director of the Ad Astra Institute in Chicago,
formerly known as the Future Institute Research Center. This Center, which currently consists of
9 research fellows, conducts research on transitions students make from grade to grade, and from
formal schooling into higher education and the world of work. Dr. Al-Mabuk’s current research
interests are threefold: comparative education; academic transitions; and psychology of
forgiveness and revenge.
Dr. Harun Parpucu is an instructor at the College of Education, the University of Northern Iowa.
He teaches classroom assessment, child development, and learning and motivation classes. Dr.
Parpucu’s current research interests include teacher professional development, child
development, and learning.
Abstract:
The paper will first provide statistics on illiteracy around the world and its impact on peace.
This will be followed by a discussion about the general role of education as an instrument of
peace. The rest of the paper will describe the role of Hizmet schools in promoting world peace.
More specifically, Hizmet Schools' curriculum, pedagogy, and relationship building between
students and teachers, home and school, school and community will be examined. The paper
will conclude with some recommendations for universalizing the Hizmet educational model for
promoting peace.
Key-Words:
Peace education, Hizmet schools, Global peace, Peace curriculum
Text:
“Education is the best way to serve humanity and to establish dialogue with other civilizations.”
Fethullah Gulen (2004, p. 198)
One of the most important goals of education is to help children to develop the knowledge,
attitudes, dispositions, and skills they need to create the conditions for a more peaceful society
and world. Translating this noble goal of education into action calls for a thoughtfully-planned
curriculum and a dedicated and well-trained teaching faculty that also serve as models of
peacebuilders, peacemakers and peacekeepers. In this paper, the topic of educating for peace
will be addressed through examining one educational model practiced by a transnational civic
movement known as the Hizmet Movement. The paper is organized in six sections: 1) global
illiteracy; 2) education as an instrument of and for peace; 3) Hizmet schools' peace curriculum
and pedagogy; 4) relationship building between students and teachers, home and school, and
school and community in the Hizmet model; and 5) universalizing the Hizmet educational model
for promoting peace.
We begin by surveying the global illiteracy landscape.
Global Illiteracy
According to UN statistics (2023), more than 244 million children around the world are
denied access to education. Hundred and thirty million of those are girls (2023). In underscoring
the importance of educating women, somebody said, “If you teach a boy, you teach an
individual. You teach a girl, a woman, you teach a community”. That is where the activism for
the right of all children to education by the 17-year-old Pakistani 2014 Nobel Prize recipient,
Malala Yousafzai, is truly phenomenal, especially when looked at and considered against these
numbers of children who are denied the right to education. Moreover, it is estimated that only 87
percent of adults around the world are literate. Put together, almost a billion people, nearly one-
seventh of the population of the earth, is illiterate, and is denied a basic human right to education.
It would take $5 billion a year for several years to achieve universal literacy, and to
reduce the huge economic and social repercussions of illiteracy. The economic costs of illiteracy
are enormous and estimated to be about $1.9 billion a year. The social consequences of illiteracy
to the individual, society, and the world are as, if not more, massive than the economic ones.
Hence, in educating for peace, efforts must first focus on ensuring that the human right to
education is available to everyone (Bhat and Jamatia, 2022; Page, 2008). The second step is to
ensure that we go beyond literacy to inculcating universal values and principles of peace in
students. That is, once literacy is achieved, we must imbue and overlay it with peace literacy.
Why and how peace literacy can be promoted through education are discussed in the next
section.
Education as an instrument of Peace
Many thinkers, educators, researchers, and organizations around the world envisage
education as the path to a global culture of peace. Maria Montessori (1949) asserted that
“preventing war is the work of politics, peace is the work of education”, (p.24). Velez and
Gerstein (2021) and Harris & Synott (2002) highlight the role of education in promoting peace.
More specifically, they stress that educating for peace must consist of teaching encounters that
engender a desire for peace and a disposition toward nonviolent and constructive alternatives to
managing and resolving conflict. In post-conflict settings, attention is given to the pivotal
capacity of education in building and sustaining peace (Bajaj, 2019; Vartan, 2012; Velez, 2021).
Organizations such as Teachers Without Borders (TWB), asserts that “if wars begin in
the human mind, then it is through our minds—through education—that war can be vanquished
by peace” (teacherswithoutborders.org). Teachers Without Borders is also an impactful
contributor to the growing movement toward a global culture of peace by providing teachers
with both a minds-on and hands-on framework for peace education. Similarly, Education
International (EI), which is the world’s largest global federation of teachers’ trade unions, views
education as “the key to uniting nations, bringing human beings closely together,” and promotes
education as a human right and public good (EI, 2015). Likewise, Pathways to Peace considers
education as “the foundation of a peaceful society (Pathways to Peace, 2015). The United
Nation has been pioneering peace education for a long time. The former UN Secretary General
Ban Ki-moon underscored the role of education in promoting peace as follows “Let us pledge to
teach our children the value of tolerance and mutual respect. Let us invest in the schools and
teachers that will build a fair and inclusive world that embraces diversity. Let us fight for peace
and defend it with all our might” (Pathways to Peace, 2015).
The foregoing begs an answer to the question: what type of education promotes
peace and, how is the education done?
There is a spectrum of focal points in educational programs for peace that seems to
revolve around three major themes: conflict resolution training, democracy education, and
human rights education. Researchers (i.e., Bhat and Jamatia, 2022, Higgins and Novelli, 2020;
Reardon, 1988, 1997, 1995; Roche, 1993, Van Slyck, Stern, and Elbedour, 1999) who focus on
these three themes all view education as the vehicle to promulgate a culture of peace.
Many (i.e., Montessori) assert that “without explicit and intentional moral and spiritual
education, mankind would inevitably revert to its habit of war” (Duckworth, 2006, p.40). Martin
Buber believed that “education worthy of the name is essentially education of character” (Buber
and Smith, 1951). In a similar fashion, the Gulen-inspired Hizmet educational project believes in
educating the whole person: mind, heart and soul. The next section first provides a brief
background about the Hizmet movement before delving into how Hizmet schools serve as a role
model for fostering peace.
Hizmet Schools
Hizmet is a Turkish word which means “service,” and stands for a transnational civic
movement inspired by the Islamic Turkish scholar, Fethullah Gulen. Gulen was influenced by
the peaceful activism, thinking, teachings and writings of Said Nursi, an Islamic scholar who
died in 1960. He wrote the Risale-i Nur Collection (Letters of Divine Light), which consists of
more than six thousand pages of commentary on the Qur’an. Nursi identified three major
challenges and obstacles to humanity’s progress toward peace: ignorance, poverty, and disunity
or conflict (Markham and Pirim, 2016; Rahim and Akhmetova, 2019). He proposed a solution
for each: education to dispel ignorance; opportunity, relief, and charity to eradicate poverty; and
tolerance, understanding and dialogue to bring about unity and solidarity. Fethullah Gulen put
the three solutions Nursi proposed into action. The Hizmet movement he inspired established
charitable and relief organizations to help the poor, founded dialogue centers to build bridges
among people of diverse backgrounds, and founded schools to eradicate ignorance. To achieve
the monumental task of uprooting ignorance, Gulen, much like leading thinkers in education
such Horace Mann, John Dewey and Ernest Boyer, stresses the need for schools to be as
concerned with developing, shaping, and nurturing character as with academics (Nelson, 2005;
Osman, 2010).
There are currently over 540 Hizmet schools operating in more than 107 countries around
the world. These schools first started in the 1980s in Turkey, and in the early 1990 spread to
Central Asia and gradually to every continent. Many of the schools are in regions and countries
that have experienced or are still experiencing hostility, war, social, ethnic, and religious conflict,
poverty such as in Bosnia, Nigeria, Philippine, Pakistan, Somalia, Ethiopia. The schools,
especially in conflict-ridden and war-ravaged countries like Afghanistan, served as sanctuaries of
peace that nurture and expand children’s and adolescents’ capacity for tolerance, peaceful
coexistence, and mutual understanding. In following with Gulen’s guidance, the schools have a
two-pronged mission: to illuminate the mind with knowledge and kindle the heart and soul in
faith and virtue. The schools help children to become caring, empathic, compassionate,
principled, and self-disciplined by meeting their psychological needs for belonging, autonomy
and competence. The school personnel are well aware that their students will identify and
engage more readily with the school and its initiatives when the school satisfies their
psychological needs. This is in line with recommendations of character development researchers
and educators. For example, Schaps, Battistich & Solomon (1997) stated that schools can satisfy
students’ intellectual development and social and ethical growth by providing opportunities for
membership in a caring community of learners as well as important, challenging, and engaging
learning opportunities. Indeed, Hizmet schools provide such opportunities to their students in a
concerted, intentional, and comprehensive fashion to enable and empower them to become
effective moral agents who know the good, desire the good, and do the good.
Peacebuilding is promoted in Hizmet schools through a number of factors: (1) inspiration
and attentive guidance of Hizmet’s spiritual guide, Fethullah Gulen—the master teacher who is
affectionately called Hocaefendi by his followers and sympathizers; (2) caring, concerned, and
compassionate teachers, administrators and staff members; (3) a curriculum and a pedagogy that
engages students’ minds and hearts; (4) educating through modeling; (5) cultivation of
constructive attitudes and ways of dealing and living with others; and (6) engendering a mastery
learning orientation in students. Each of these factors is briefly discussed next.
Fethullah Gulen, Peace Inspirer
Fethullah Gulen is an influential figure in peace education and has advanced a vision and
pedagogy for peace. Hizmet educational system derives its inspiration from Fethullah Gulen’s
faith-based action-oriented philosophy of education. The ultimate goal of education for Gulen is
not to produce an individual who will feed the materialistic machine, to land a good-paying job,
or to live the good life and enjoy a higher standard of living than those who do not “earn” a
degree. To him, the aim of education is to fuse science with spirituality and to raise what he
calls a “Golden Generation.” The Golden Generation is one that will use knowledge to: guide its
life, strive to continually refine and perfect its development, and serve selflessly so others (all
human beings) can live in peace and harmony. They will, in addition, be good citizens who have
deep regard for themselves and others, who are committed to democracy and the core values of
justice and caring, and who strive to be civil and considerate in their interactions with others.
“Tolerance, a term which we use in place of the words respect, mercy, generosity, or
forbearance, is the most essential element of moral systems; it is a very important source of
spiritual discipline and a celestial virtue of perfected people” (Gulen, 2004, pp.33-34).
Faculty & Staff
The administrators, teaching faculty, and school staff in Hizmet schools view their work
as a sacred duty. They view educating students as an awesome responsibility which they assume
with a high level of commitment and dedication. Teachers, in particular, believe that in addition
to helping students to become top performers in every academic subject, they also deem it their
utmost duty to help students in their personal, spiritual and character development. They
empower their students to become moral agents who engage in systematic and intentional pro-
social behavior. Moreover, the teachers deliberately seek to cultivate virtue in the minds, hearts,
and souls of their students. This practice is in line with Lickona’s (2012) thinking, particularly
his description of character as comprised of a cognitive, an affective, and a behavioral
dimension. The cognitive component is responsible for moral knowing; the affective part carries
out the moral feeling; and the behavioral aspect carries out moral action. Thus, an individual
with good character knows the good, desires the good, and does the good. Put another way,
Lickona (2012) views the cognitive as the place where habits of mind are cultivated, the affective
as the site for habits of heart, and the behavioral as the stage where habits of actions or behaviors
are activated and enacted. Teachers in Hizmet schools address all of these three dimensions.
Dual-Focused Curriculum & Pedagogy
Hizmet schools deliberately strive to integrate science and knowledge with spirituality.
In Gulen’s view, the emphasis on cultivating students’ mind and heart metaphorically imparts
two wings to the learner with which to fly while firmly anchored in universal ethical values.
Repeatedly in his writings, Gulen points out the need to blend and adorn knowledge with love so
that students become well versed in the modern sciences and acquire the skills to thoughtfully
and wisely apply what they learn for the sake of others. In this regard, Gulen’s perspective of
adorning knowledge with self-sacrificing love is similar to Bertrand Russel (1961) who asserted
that “There is only one road to progress, in education as in other human affairs, and that is:
Science wielded by love. Without science, love is powerless; without love, science is
destructive” (p.158).
Educating Through Modeling
Teachers, administrators, school staff, student mentors and volunteer teachers are
selected and hired for their strong academic qualifications and moral and ethical dispositions.
The schools fully recognize the potent impact of seeing in addition to hearing. That is, the
school personnel are devoted to representing what they preach in action before they preach it or
teach it to students. When they speak about universal values such as altruism, honesty, integrity,
trustworthiness, courage, respect, tolerance, responsibility, love, and compassion, teachers follow
Gulen’s guidance of internalizing these values and model them before they instill such values in
their students (Yucel, 2010). Gulen strongly urges teachers to represent and model the values
before they communicate and inculcate them in their students. Teachers diligently follow this
instruction as attested to by the following words of an observer of Gulen-inspired schools “Gulen
schools excel in academics because the instructors strive for perfection not only in having a
command of their subject matter but also in (1) loving and caring for their students and (2)
developing their own character as much as, if not more than, their students’ character”
(Woodhall, 2009).
Constructive Attitudes & Actions
Students are socialized in the ideals of tolerance and dialogue, which Gulen regards as
“the two roses of the Emerald Hills.” This is accomplished by nourishing students with the moral
lesson of “without hands against those who strike you, without speech against those who curse
you” (Gulen, 2004, p. 54). This dictum is modeled and practiced in schools. Focus is given to
the role of self-disciplined training to deepen one’s sense and capacity for love and compassion
and to put them into action to embrace others. Emphasis is placed on adopting constructive
means to resolve differences and conflicts with others.
Mastery-Learning Orientation
Peacebuilding is also fostered by Hizmet schools through making students associate
learning with positive outcomes so that they gradually become passionate about learning—both
scientific knowledge and self-sacrificial love. The students strive to excel so that they can be
instruments of mercy for humanity. The different types of Olympiads that Hizmet schools
participate in internationally and locally are an outward expression of students’ continual and
diligent endeavors to perfect their knowledge and skills and their untiring struggle to refine their
character (Dayan and Yildiz, 2022).
To conclude, the worldwide Hizmet educational initiatives are promoting peace in the
more than 107 countries they operate in. These schools help boys and girls gain an education
and shower them with hope. They also equip them with universal moral values that instill in
them love, respect, peace, and service-oriented ethic for all people of the world.
The Hizmet schools remain committed to being at the forefront of waging global peace.
Its educational model is worth emulating by others who aim at educating students to be effective
and better prepared to promote the cause of peace in their respective communities.
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