There is much evidence that violence can be neutralized by age-appropriate and well planned education Testimony of organizations and individuals seems to confirm the fact that where hitherto the school year was punctuated with irregularities due to the misbehavior of students, the situation changes dramatically when Alive to the World / AW, the Values Education program of the international organization Alliance for the Family / AFF, is adopted.
Two cases of this positive effect illustrate the benefits obtained by schools and communities with this approach. Uncontrollable violence and inappropriate behavior at Saint Augustine School in La Pastora, a lower middle-income community of Caracas, Venezuela, was undermining scholastic achievement until 2003. In only 5 years of the application of this program, the situation has changed radically.
Today the students of this school are considered a model for other schools. The Directors of the school attribute this change to the one-hour per week program, grades 1-12, of Alive to the World / AW, which was adopted in 2004. Virgilio Cartagena, director of Values Education at this school of 1000 students, explains that prior to 2004 the school was rife with problems; to the extreme that in 2003 one entire level had to be expelled. Since the program was initiated, the level of violence has diminished to the extent that it is no longer a problem in this important city school. Another very different case involves a new public “Bolivarian school” (part of President Hugo Chavez’ “school revolution”) in a small town of mainly unemployed people, 60 miles west of Caracas.
Martha Angulo, the valiant director of this school, Don Simon Rodriguez in the “Barrio 5th of July,” a new and precarious section of El Consejo in Revenga County, Aragua, has a similar tale to tell. There she has had occasion to have to salvage a teacher who was cornered by students wielding sticks and poles. She herself was told that “one of these days they are going to find you covered with flies,” she laughs. That was before she decided to adopt Alive to the World / AW (Aprendiendo a Querer / AaQ) as an experiment in 2005. She beams with pride as she tells us that violence is gone from the school now, as her pupils have identified with the characters in the books, who live normal lives at school, at home and in the community and grow from year to year as the students do. The students say they love the books as they contain the very elements of their lives, and find the solutions to everyday situations in a way that is both positive and logical.
“We were looking to improve their Human and Social Capital in order to give these children a chance in life”, says Christine Vollmer, a member of the group which developed this program, “and this improvement in problems of violence is a wonderful bonus.”
