by Lillian Koizumi
Special to the Tribune
Amid renewed global tensions and the ongoing threat of nuclear war, the Ikeda Center co-hosted a weekendlong conference, “Educating for Peace: A Teachers’ Conference for Nuclear Disarmament Education,” bringing together dedicated educators to address this critical challenge.
The conference marked the beginning of a collaborative effort intended to help middle and high school teachers to reimagine education as a powerful tool for preventing nuclear war in the near term and achieving nuclear disarmament in the long term.
Joining the Ikeda Center as co-organizers of the event were the Soka Institute for Global Solutions at Soka University of America, the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey and EdEthics at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
The conference kicked off on May 9 with a panel discussion featuring educators and nuclear disarmament experts, held at the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Askwith Hall. The event included a virtual message by Dr. Hideko Tamura-Snider, a hibakusha (atomic bomb survivor) and founder of One Sunny Day Initiatives and Peace Ambassador of Hiroshima City.
During opening remarks, Ikeda Center Executive Director Kevin Maher shared Daisaku Ikeda’s call for each of us to “make a personal decision and determination to build a new world free of nuclear weapons.”[1]
During the discussion, panelists emphasized the need to address the dearth of knowledge among citizens about the true threat of nuclear weapons as well the importance of challenging the mostly unexamined claim that these weapons serve as effective deterrents to war.
On Saturday and Sunday, participants learned about the growing danger of nuclear war, historical legacies and nuclear justice, and were exposed to youth perspectives, hibakusha experiences and U.N.-level disarmament education. They also learned from educators who are already integrating nuclear disarmament content into existing curricula.
Throughout the conference, teachers pondered how they might bring disarmament education into their own classrooms, including what barriers they face, what a lesson plan would look like in their own context and how to grow and sustain a network of teachers committed to teaching nuclear disarmament.
One local high school teacher in Massachusetts reflected that prior to the conference, she knew nothing about down-winders (victims of nuclear testing) and expressed “the importance of being truthful of the implications of using nuclear weapons.”
Another teacher from San Francisco shared that, upon returning to her school, she learned that none of her fellow teachers had read John Hershey’s Hiroshima. She successfully encouraged them to assign this powerful book as summer reading.
June 13, 2025 World Tribune, p. 4
References
- https://www.worldtribune.org/2022/2011-peace-proposal-in-full/ <accessed on June 2, 2025>. ↩︎
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