I noticed that your most recent blog (Christmas Day, 2013) talks about forgiveness education in Belfast. If others such as myself were interested in starting forgiveness education in our little area of the world, what would be some of your key suggestions?
Anyone can help to start forgiveness education in their own community. If you visit our Store section of this website, you will see that we have professionally-produced curriculum guides for teachers from pre-kindergarten (age 4) through grade 11 (using United States language here) (grade 11 includes students at age 16-17). These guides can be used effectively by teachers who are motivated to spend up to one hour a week for about 12-15 weeks instructing students. Each teacher guide uses stories that are appropriate for the grade level. If the books that are recommended in each guide are too expensive, we have professionally-produced book summaries of each one. The summaries are about 2-3 pages long and get at the gist of the stories (as far as forgiveness is concerned).
In impoverished and conflict-zones of the world, we give all of the above materials away for free—no charge and no hidden costs. For others, we ask for purchase so we can continue serving contentious regions of the world.
You also can access teacher evaluations of these programs in the Education section of the website and you will see that teachers are very favorable to these programs.
Consider taking courage in hand and bringing a sample of the teacher guides to a local school (along with the teacher-evaluation information). Tell the principal or teacher about the objective of forgiveness education: to help children grown in the virtues of love, mercy, and forgiveness, which can reduce student anger and increase academic achievement. Tell the principal or teacher that we provide free materials (if they are in an impoverished or contentious region). Further, we at the International Forgiveness Institute are willing to provide Skype training sessions to groups of teachers who are interested.
