School and war

2026 began with a harsh and persistent winter. Gray days, thick fog, incessant rain, flood warnings, snow in the Pyrenees, and severe weather in the Empordà region. This cold is not merely meteorological. It is also a moral chill that seeps into the streets and hearts as wars once again dominate the headlines and Europe accepts increasing militarization as an inevitable horizon in a context of democratic fragility and a crisis of the rule of law. As Timothy Garton Ash stated in these pages"We have entered a new era: a post-Western world marked by illiberal international disorder." In our house, dozens of people They continue to sleep under the C-31 bridgeVictims of institutional violence and hate speech, exposed to the harshest weather of the year. We are not impervious: the cold penetrates the squares, the neighborhoods, and even the classrooms.

Surveys say it, and teachers confirm it: young people are becoming radicalized and seeking meaning in extremist narratives, in Catalonia and everywhere else. In this context, pedagogy cannot be neutral. Now more than ever, schools are becoming spaces of democratic resistance. In this sense, the Plan for Democratic Education, presented by the Catalan Government to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Franco's death, points in the right direction: strengthening democratic memory, critical thinking, and civic participation. It is a necessary tool to protect schools from a turbulent era that inevitably seeps into the hallways and classrooms.

Beyond public policies, however, it is essential that faculty and leadership teams create genuine spaces for debate, reflection, and moral discernment. Faced with certain discourses and behaviors, whether in the classroom or in interactions with families, individual responses from each teacher are insufficient. It is necessary to share difficult questions, often without a single answer, but which challenge the values ​​that underpin the educational community. Setting clear boundaries, defining red lines, and doing so collectively are part of educational responsibility. A teacher recently explained that basic consensus no longer exists in high school and that some students openly express xenophobic or authoritarian ideas. A principal described the difficulty of managing families who question the diversity among the students at the school. Another leadership team wanted to take a stand by organizing acts of solidarity with Gaza, but faced two significant challenges: firstly, that there are Jewish families at the school, and secondly, that organizing events for Gaza would highlight the lack of action regarding the brutal Russian aggression, even though the school had welcomed children from Jewish families. These tensions are not anecdotal: they are a reflection of a world at war that is fully entering the school.

In this context, a group of European authors has recently published in theInternational Journal of Lifelong Education the publisher Peace education in times of warWritten in the shadow of the war in Ukraine, the text argues that it is necessary to rethink peace education, moving beyond an overly reliant view on dialogue and reason as sufficient antidotes to violence. Heirs to the Enlightenment and the UNESCO project, we have educated for decades with the conviction that peace was the norm and war an avoidable anomaly. But current reality reveals its limitations.

Educating for peace cannot be naive. Failing to prepare students to confront organized violence, authoritarian aggression, and the need to defend democracy is a form of abandonment. Peace is not an abstract value, but a process of critical awareness. As Paulo Freire warned, there is no neutral education: to educate is always to take a stand, and to do so from a place of awareness. It is to read the world in order to transform it. Kant already stated that peace is not a natural state, but a moral and political construct that demands responsibility.

It is therefore urgent to move towards a pedagogy of resistance: an education that neither glorifies war nor renounces nonviolence, but that confronts real ethical dilemmas of our time, such as the need to defend democracy and human rights against aggression. In times of war and propaganda, educating for peace also means educating for truth: to discern, to not normalize imposed violence, nor accept simplistic or dehumanizing narratives. How can we show solidarity with those who defend themselves against illegal employment and ethnic cleansing? How can we defend freedom without diminishing human dignity? How can we uphold the truth when propaganda and manipulation triumph?

Next Friday, January 30, the anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi's death, is the School Day of Nonviolence and Peace. Every teacher, every faculty, faces a challenge. Educating for peace today means taking on burning questions and doing so with clarity and courage. The authors of Peace education in times of war They warn that educating for peace without addressing real conflicts — such as the war imposed in the heart of Europe — can end up turning pedagogy into a narrative disconnected from life.