Conflict Resolution Center holds a course entitled "A sound upbringing for the rising generations"

Gaza, Conflict Resolution Center:

The Palestinian Center for Democracy and Conflict Resolution and the Coalition of Civil Forces for Civil Peace held a meeting at Khadamat Al-Nuseirat Club with a group of women and university students entitled "A sound upbringing for the rising generations, away from political disputes"

Mr. Fayez Zaqout, the project's field coordinator at the Conflict Resolution Center in Gaza, said: "The aim of holding this course is to make parents aware of sound methods of upbringing, away from odious party disputes."

He added that we at the Centre are working to deliver 30 workshops to strengthen the concepts of civil peace and tolerance in Palestinian society, reaching all groups in society.

Mr. Zaher Al-Banna, head of the central council of parents in the Gaza Strip, spoke at the meeting, explaining the main forms of the phenomenon of violence practised in schools, its types and its internal and external causes, and how far children are affected by the society around them, particularly the political conflict prevailing in society.

He added that the family plays a principal and important part in planting noble cultures in the child, such as tolerance, love and dialogue as an alternative to violence, and that the school and civil society organisations also play a prominent part in planting a culture of tolerance and acceptance of others.

Al-Banna pointed to the important role played by parents' councils in schools in reducing the violence prevailing in society, through cultural and awareness programmes directed at pupils and others directed at teachers, advising and guiding pupils not to practise violence among themselves, and also urging school counsellors to follow up certain cases at home.

At the end of the meeting Ms. Suhaila Sawan, a homemaker, expressed the importance of the role mothers play in planting a culture of tolerance in their children, describing how the violence practised by pupils at school is sometimes directed at the teacher, which calls for planting a culture of accepting others and for pupils to have high standards of conduct and never to be insolent towards a teacher.

The participants recommended the need to establish an initiative by women calling for tolerance and acceptance of others, whose ideas would be spread starting from within the single family and extending to society as a whole, and which might be called "From house to house we make peace".