John Hunter is an award-winning gifted teacher and educational consultant who has dedicated his life to helping children realize their full potential. He was voted as one of the “Top 100 TED Speakers of All Time,” named a 2014 TED “All Star,” and has won a 2012 GlobArt Award (Austria) and a 2013 Common Ground Award. He has addressed audiences at Google, Harvard Law School, the United States Defense Department at the Pentagon and the United Nations Conflict Resolution Special Committee. His World Peace Game is the subject of a nationally distributed, award-winning documentary which has also aired in Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and Latin America.
WORLD PEACE and OTHER 4TH-GRADE ACHIEVEMENTS
“His ideas will help anyone who has the courage to understand that a real education must go beyond filling in circles on a standardized test form.”—Rafe Esquith, author of Teach Like Your Hair’s on Fire
WORLD PEACE AND OTHER 4TH-GRADE ACHIEVEMENTS shares educator John Hunter’s stories of conflict resolution and collective problem-solving gleaned from 30 years teaching children the World Peace Game, a groundbreaking global systems simulation he invented.
In Hunter’s classroom, students take on the roles of presidents, tribal leaders, diplomats, and military commanders and strive to resolve a sequence of scenarios from nuclear proliferation to tribal warfare. The overarching message of the game—and the book—is that together, groups of people can solve problems that no individual could possibly solve alone. When we recognize that our own self-interest is inextricably bound up with the whole, we can achieve extraordinarily creative solutions. In this deeply hopeful book, a visionary educator offers a generous blueprint for a world that bends toward cooperation, rather than conflict—and shows us what the future can be.