Curle, Charles T.W. 1916-2006
(Adam Curle, Charles Thomas William Curle)

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born July 4, 1916, in L'Isle Adam, France; died September 28, 2006. Activist, anthropologist, educationist, and author. The founder of the Centre for Peace Studies at the University of Bradford, Curle was a pacifist who believed that better education and nonviolent negotiations could prevent military conflicts. A Quaker who in later years also became a follower of Buddhism, he studied history and then anthropology at Oxford University. From 1940 until 1946, he served in the British Army, and during this time became concerned about violence against prisoners of war and their recovery. After the war, he completed his bachelor's and master's degrees in anthropology at Oxford and joined the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations. His focus turned to psychology and sociology, and he worked as a lecturer in social psychology at Oxford from 1950 to 1952. Curle believed that social psychology should inform teaching methods. He also felt that students should be taught how to better deal with the outside world, emotionally and psychologically, which would also help prevent trauma as an adult. After he taught educational psychology at the University of Exeter in the early 1950s, Harvard Univeristy invited him to travel to Pakistan as an advisor. He remained there for three years, putting his theories into practice, before joining the Ghana University faculty as professor of education for two years. Curle then moved to America to serve as a professor of education and development at Harvard, where he established the Harvard Center for Studies in Education and Development. As part of his Harvard work, he regularly traveled around the world to help countries with their education and development programs during the 1960s and early 1970s. He also served as an advisor to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees and continued to assist with Pakistan's development programs. An active peace mediator, assisting with negotiations in Nigeria and, more recently, in Yugoslavia, Curle was imprisoned for several weeks in South Africa. The police brutality he suffered during the time of apartheid reinforced his resolve to be a champion for peace. In 1973, Curle returned to England and established his Centre for Peace Studies at the University of Bradford. He developed popular master's and doctoral degree programs, retiring in 1978. Honored in 2000 with the Gandhi Peace Price, Curle was the author of many books that advocated pacifism and education. Among these are Making Peace (1971), Violence, Reconciliation and Anger (1975), In the Middle: Non-Official Mediation in Violent Situations (1986), and To Tame the Hydra: Undermining the Culture of Violence (1999).

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Times (London, England), October 3, 2006, p. 62.