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Partnership
Education
integrates gender-balance, multiculturalism, and environmentalism,
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Six Keys To Partnership Education The six keys that follow are useful as an introduction to Partnership Education and as guidelines for developing lesson plans and curricula. Tools In our rapidly changing world, we need new tools for thinking and acting. The partnership and dominator models are tools for more clearly understanding our world as it is and how it can be if we more fully develop our personal and social potentials. The partnership-dominator continuum is an analytical lens that reveals patterns in what otherwise seems random and disconnected, helping us sort the information overload of our postmodern age. A related set of tools are partnership competencies, ranging from emotional and parenting competence to scientific, environmental, and spiritual competence. Partnership Education also offers the teaching tool of partnership process, which complements partnership content. It models partnership in action, helping to create a democratic, stimulating, and nurturing learning environment: a partnership structure where all students are valued and teachers, other staff, and students can relate in mutually respectful and caring ways. Values Partnership Education provides guidelines for living on this Earth in less destructive, more peaceful, equitable, and sustainable ways. Much in our culture focuses on acquiring material possessions rather than on living rich and meaningful lives. It presents violence as not only inevitable but manly. And it often gives the false impression that our only choice is between regressing to more authoritarian and less equitable ways of living or a total lack of standards. Rather than conditioning young people to live rudderless lives or to rely on external controls and fear of punishments, Partnership Education teaches young people values such as empathy and responsibility, showing that our actions have consequences. It empowers young people to think for themselves, develop standards for ethical and moral life choices, be better citizens, create more caring families and communities, preserve our natural habitat, and live more emotionally and spiritually satisfying lives. Structures Science Integration Inspiration Children need education that inspires them to be the best they can be. Much in our mass media presents a world of constant conflict, cruelty, and pain - whether in the news stories that get headlines or in the endless "entertainment" depicting violence and abuse as "fun." Partnership Education counters this false picture of what is possible and desirable for human relations. It shows that, despite massive resistance and periodic regressions, there has during the last three hundred years been movement toward partnership rather than dominator relations in families, workplaces, and governments. It highlights the inspiring stories of courageous women and men of all races and ethnic origins who have braved ridicule, censure, and violence to bring us greater freedom and equality. It shows that all of us can, through both individual and group action, through both consciousness and service, continue to strengthen this forward movement and find real meaning and purpose in our lives.
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