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.
[1][2][3][4][5] 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.
[6] The significance of the IIPE was cited by UNESCO in a special honorary mention at the Peace Education Prize ceremony in 2002.
"[11] 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.
"[11] As a result, she argued that "the conceptual core of peace education is violence, it's control, reduction, and elimination", while the "conceptual core of human rights education is human dignity, its recognition, fulfillment, and universalization.
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."
[12] She also thought that since World War II, the U.S. had increasingly accepted militarism, which she felt contradicted existing social values and norms.
She believed that in order to confront sexism, people should engage in the processes that would reverse it.
[12] This falls in line with her view that humans inhabit one planet and what we: "have to do as a species is assent to that and recognize and behave as if we are one.