MUMBAI: 26th August --  There is a stark contrast between the events of the last few days in Mumbai and new plans revealed by the Salesian Media Education centre (aka Don Bosco Communications or Tej Prasarini) for September.  Commencing, perhaps not accidentally, on September 11th, Tej  Prasarini is offering a three day peace seminar for teachers and youth workers.  The chief resource person is former director, now Webmaster extraordinaire for the Salesian Rome Web Portal, Fr. Peter Gonsalves, himself the author of several school and group-based texts on peace education.  The Tej Prasarini announcement from director Fr. Darryl D'Souza, lends hope to those whose city has been shattered by extremist bombers.  One way forward is to tackle the roots of peace in the minds of the young, by training educators to educate to peace:

"As we are in the International Decade for a Culture of Peace and Non-Violence for the Children of the World, TEJ-PRASARINI, Don Bosco Communications has now entered into another communication campaign (after its successful campaign for Media Education) for a value very important and essential for society and the children: Peace and Non-Violence. And what better way to make a start than to teach trainers the art of educating students and youth to Peace.

Schools are the most effective centres to start this training among the children. Here children of different languages, caste, colour, religion and states learn to live in harmony with diversity. Our Seminar, 'Educating Students to Peace', will serve to build the capacity of teachers to become trainers of Peace.  It would serve be a very useful tool to schools to start a systematic education to Peace in their own contexts and enable children to imbibe this important value right from their school days in a systematic and constant manner.

In 2001, Tej-Prasarini shot a video of action songs on Peace and harmony by children called ‘Premsanchar', in Hindi. In 2002 it released a manual, “Exercises of Education to Peace” for teachers and a workbook ‘We choose Peace’ for children; it shot several videos like ‘Nipped in the Bud’ and ‘Caste Out’ to highlight how the evils of the present social system has disturbed the harmony in the lives of children; and this year it has launched a ‘Communication Campaign for Peace’ wherein school and college students are being trained to shoot short video films on Peace and non-violence. In this context comes this course is designed specifically for Principals, Educators and Youth Workers. Tej-Prasarini is one of a kind Media Education Centre that is glad to offer such a systematic syllabus for Peace and the training for teachers to implement it.

Mahatma Gandhi said” If we are to have Peace, let us begin with the children.”  Welcome to Tej-Prasarini. Welcome to the make the world a peaceful place for our children.

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