Learning to live together: an intercultural and interfaith programme for ethics education

Learning to Live Together has been developed for use in different religious and secular contexts as a resource for everyone concerned with promoting ethics and values. The objective has been to develop a resource that is relevant on a global level and yet flexible enough to be interpreted within different cultural and social contexts. The resource has been tested in many different regions and cultural contexts to assure that it is relevant in regional and local contexts (see ‘We did it like this’, p.187).

Test workshops have been held in 10 different countries, where the GNRC was able to bring together various religious and secular organisations working with children. During the test workshops, this resource manual was used to the benefit of more than 300 children and youth, representing African Traditional Religions, Bahá’í Faith, Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, members of Brahma Kumaris and a number of people of secular thinking. Test workshops as well as input and comments from experts in the area of education, ethics, spirituality, intercultural and interfaith learning and child rights have contributed important experiences and opportunities for learning for the development of this resource. Learning to Live Together is already having an impact. In a GNRC programme in Israel, the resource material was used during a six-day journey made by a group of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim youth to the historical sites of Israel and Palestine, all of which have symbolic relevance to the conflict in their region. At each stop, youth participants discussed their values and their differing perceptions of their shared history.

Learning to Live Together is an adaptable resource that can be used with children from many different cultural, religious and social contexts to nurture common values and a mutual respect for different backgrounds and traditions. The resource provides space for enhancing children’s innate potential for spirituality and hope for a better world, as a contribution to changing the situation for children worldwide. The Users Guide provides all necessary information for its use. UNESCO and UNICEF have been closely involved in developing Learning to Live Together and have endorsed the material as an important contribution to a quality education, which takes a multicultural and multi-religious society into consideration. UNESCO’s Guidelines for Intercultural Education underpin the philosophy and the approach of the resource: “Religious education can be described as learning about one’s own religion or spiritual practices, or learning about other religions or beliefs. Interfaith education, in contrast, aims to actively shape the relations between people from different religions”.