“Education is an opportunity for the growth and emancipation of the individual and the collective; it is a resource for gaining knowledge and for learning to live together; it is a meeting place where freedom, democracy and solidarity are practiced and where the value of peace is promoted.”
Indications, Preschools and Infant-Toddler Centres of the Municipality of Reggio Emilia (2009)
On this International Day of Peace, REAIE reflects on the origins of the Reggio Emilia Educational Project; an approach born out of the devastation of the Second World War, and out of a community’s determination to build a different future for its children.
For our colleagues in Reggio Emilia, peace has never simply meant the absence of war or conflict. It is interwoven with democracy, participation and the genuine reciprocty that comes to life between people who are mutually invested in a better future. Education here, plays a formative role, creating the conditions for people to learn and live together in solidarity, with an enduring regard for the common good.
Claudia Giudici, Regional advocate for children and young people in the region of Emilia Romagna, shared recently at the REAIE online Research Symposium: Educating for peace and the rights of every child
“Like democracy, peace cannot be taught…we must live and practice peace…. Schools (can be) places where peace is a transversal ethic, threaded through everything else, a generative compass orienting ways of ‘being’ in schools as places of practicing peace. Schools must ask: what do we mean by democratic culture…what are the tools available to us to make peace a culture?”
-Claudia Giudici, 2026
This work begins in childhood, but it belongs to all of us. Every school and community can be a place where peace is lived daily. Opportunities for peace exist in how we listen, whose voices are heard, how we respond to and welcome difference, and how we create room for dialogue and participation with an emphasis on shared responsibility.
The first schools of Reggio Emilia were built by women and men determined to make a difference in the aftermath of war. Their response was not simply to hope for a different future – it was to actively build it.
The construction of a society that honours and upholds peace is, in the same way, an ongoing process. It asks something of each of us: to look closely at the relationships, environments and institutions we are creating, and at the kind of society they make possible. Peace is not something we inherit. It is something we must each help to build, every day.
