Peace Week, 2025

“It isn’t enough to talk about peace. One must believe in it. And it isn’t enough to believe in it. One must work at it.”
– Eleanor Roosevelt, 1960

What does it mean to “work at peace” – for a child, for a school, for us as adults?

This week, we join communities worldwide in recognizing the International Day of Peace. At Oak Grove, we extend this observance into an entire Peace Week, inviting our students and staff to explore the notion of peace in their own lives and in our shared world.

Peace Week Curriculum

Peace Tree Art Installation

Throughout the week, classrooms will weave peace into the curriculum, and students will collaborate in creating a Peace Tree art installation – a living reminder that peace requires our collective care. On Friday, we will gather for an all-school assembly to celebrate our reflections.

Confronting Our Conditioning

Although anti-bias education is part of daily life at Oak Grove, Peace Week is a time when teachers devote extra focus to examining bias, prejudice, and responsibility. This approach reflects Krishnamurti’s encouragement to look deeply into our own conditioning – into the images and assumptions that shape how we see others and ourselves. Confronting this conditioning is not easy. It requires honesty, courage, and vulnerability.

The aim is not to eliminate all bias – that is not possible – but to understand our own thinking. When we recognize how unconscious patterns drive our actions, we begin to see how they can contribute to conflict and suffering. For children to develop this awareness, they must feel safe and understood. They must be given space to ask both practical and timeless questions, to inquire with rigor, and to grow sensitive to the world within as well as the world around them.

“We in the movement decided to actualize our belief that the hatred we experienced was not based on any truth, but was actually an illusion in the minds of those who hated us.” – John Lewis

What Does “Peace” Mean to You?

Civil rights leader John Lewis once said: “We in the movement decided to actualize our belief that the hatred we experienced was not based on any truth, but was actually an illusion in the minds of those who hated us.” His words remind us of the illusions we must examine and the truths we must live by.

And as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote in 1958: “True peace is not merely the absence of tension; it is the presence of justice.”

May you also have the space this week to reflect on what peace means to you and to explore the ways you might greet conflict with a deeper awareness of the world within you and the world around you.