Betty Reardon

Betty A. Reardon (June 12, 1929 – November 3, 2023) was an American teacher and the founder and director of the Peace Education Center and Peace Education Graduate Degree Program at Teachers College, Columbia University. She was a leader in peace education and a scholar in human rights education at the primary and secondary levels. Along with Elise Boulding and Cynthia Enloe, she was also considered part of the "pioneering generation of women in peace studies" because of her efforts to highlight the dominance of "white haired wise men" in the field, and her desire to make women’s ideas and issues a central part of the debate on world peace. Her publications comprise over 300 works in a number of subject areas including: peace studies, peace education, human rights, gender, and ecology.

Career Reardon founded the International Institute on Peace Education (IIPE) which has held conferences in sixteen countries, with educators coming from approximately one hundred countries. Reardon’s work for key institutions, and her writings, have defined the field of peace education, and resulted in her holding numerous prominent roles such as: the Honorary Co-chair of Peace and Justice Studies Association's Advisory Committee; the Academic Coordinator of the Peace Education Professional Development Certificate Program at Teachers College-Tokyo Campus; the School Program Director at the Institute for World Order; and the President of International Jury for the UNESCO Prize for Peace Education. She also held a Doctorate in Education from Teachers College, Columbia University, an MA in history from New York University, and a BA in history from Wheaton College.

Ideas, influences, and political stances

Peace and human rights education In her view, peace education is vitally important. In a chapter of her book, Human Rights Education as Education for Peace, she wrote about the development of peace education, but she also said that "peace education as such is less visible in American secondary and elementary schools than ... other approaches" to peace; and that "only a small fraction of university students ever pursue courses in peace studies." This leads to her discussion of human rights education which, she says, "comprehends some of the same normative goals espoused by peace" but while it is "certainly necessary, it is far from sufficient and fails to exploit the essential contribution that human rights can make to peace education." Her solution to this is reordering secondary school education. She argued that there needs to be a: "shift from competitive to cooperative modes of learning... seeing education as bringing forth the capacity to deal with the unprecedented and traditional problems." This is part of her goal to consciously nurture "global peace learning...the things that make for peace."

Internationalism Reardon believes that the world is completely interconnected. She has said in the past, that the world needs to: "move from the anarchy of the war system that we have now as the planetary order into some planetary law system"; and that we need a notion of world community that recognizes that: "the world is a single system, not only ecologically, economically, and in fact, politically", and committing ourselves to making this system a reality.

Written works Partial listing: Discrimination: the Cycle of Injustice (1976) . Sexism and the War System (1985) Comprehensive Peace Education: Educating for Global Responsibility (1988) Learning Peace: the Promise of Ecological and Cooperative Education (1994) Women and Peace:Feminist Visions of Global Security (1993)(chapter of Women and peace : feminist visions of global security.) Educating for Human Dignity: Learning About Rights and Responsibilities (1994) Education for a Culture of Peace in a Gender Perspective (2001) Learning to Abolish War: Teaching Toward a Culture of Peace (2002) Educating for Human Dignity (2002) The Gender Imperative:Human Security vs. State Security Betty A. Reardon: Key Texts in Gender and Peace (2014) Betty A. Reardon: A Pioneer in Education for Peace and Human Rights (2014)

Awards Sean MacBride Prize, International Peace Bureau, 2009 El Hibri Peace Education Prize, 2013.