- Recently, my colleague Jacqui Tricarico down at the Atlantic City, NJEA, New Jersey Education Association Convention in Atlantic City, sat down with John Hunter, who's founder of a terrific organization called World Peace Game Foundation.

They talked about conflict resolution.

They talk about problem solving and promoting world peace.

Imagine that.

Jacqui and John Hunter, let's check it out.

- Hi, I'm Jacqui Tricarico, Senior Correspondent for "One-on-One," here at the NJEA Convention in Atlantic City.

And so honored to be joined by Mr. John Hunter, the Founder of The World Peace Foundation, and an NJEA keynote speaker here at the convention this year.

Great to have you with us.

- Hey, Jacqui.

I'm happy to be with you.

- So nice to be able to speak with you.

So, first and foremost, you are an educator.

You, more recently retired.

I don't know if we can totally call it retiring, but almost 50 years teaching in our public schools.

Talk about how you knew teaching was your calling and what kept you passionate for all those years.

- You know, Jacqui, I really did not know that teaching was my calling.

I accidentally became a teacher.

I kept dropping in and out of college, couldn't find the right way for myself.

And then I, finally, with the pleading of my parents, "Please get a degree in something," I went back.

And there was an experimental program in something, but the back of the sign, what the program was, was torn off.

I didn't know what it was in, but I knew I was an experimental kind of person.

So, I said, I'll do that.

Could have been dentistry, forestry, could have been anything, but it happened to be education.

And it was an experimental program, which suited my nature.

And I happily dove into it and found out that was what I should be doing.

- Talk about, I know you've talked about this in a TED Talk that you gave about that first job that you got, and how it opened up so much for you, personally and as an educator.

- Yeah, the very first teaching interview I got for a job, I had a three-piece suit.

I had a- - Sharp, like you are today.

(Jacqui laughs) - I had a film projector, slides and screens, all the things I had done as a pre-service teacher.

And I put them aside, never even got to use them.

The supervisor, we had the interview, Anna Lou Aaroe was her name, in Richmond Public Schools in Virginia in 1977.

And she said, "What do you want to do?"

And I said, "Well, I want to be a great teacher.

I want to teach these gifted inner-city children in this new experimental high school.

How do I do that?"

And she refused to tell me how to teach.

It upset me greatly, because I really just wanted guidance.

I wanted to be shown how to do a good job.

But she said instead, "What do you want to do?"

And that opened up everything.

Instead of being a detriment, it turned out to be the cornerstone of everything I would do for the next 45 years.

- So, that opened up for you too in 1978, creating The World Peace Game.

So, this is something that you taught for many, many years.

I want to understand it and listen to your breakdown of it, because I've been trying to understand the game myself, reading your book, and watching videos, and it seems like such complex issues.

But, your fourth graders over all those years really understood it, and we're able to do so many amazing things with the game.

So tell us, what is The World Peace game?

- It's a geopolitical simulation.

It started out as a four-by-five piece of plywood on the floor for those high school kids I talked about, with tiny little game pieces from junk shops and toy stores.

And I just wanted to put them into a problem solving mode.

Problem solving was in vogue in 1970s.

And so I wanted them to solve problems.

I had to teach social studies, but I knew from my undergraduate mentors, Ms. Ethel J.

Banks, particularly, in Richmond Public Schools, that I needed to marry their passions with the curriculum.

"Find out what they love," she said.

"And once you marry or pair that love with the curriculum, their love will drive the learning."

So social studies, board games.

1978, that's all we had.

No social media at all.

So, we paired board games with social studies.

And it just kept going and the students kept innovating with it.

And so now it's a four-by-four-by-four Plexiglas tower, a structure with four horizontal layers of plexiglass, four-by-four, about and a half an inch thick.

Undersea layer, down to the shoes, the kids' shoe tops.

Ground and sea level at their knees.

Aircraft a level at their shoulders.

And outer space level just above their heads.

They got to stand on chairs sometimes to move things.

Thousands of game pieces.

I give them 50 interlocking real world global problems to solve that adults have not solved.

And I let them know that.

I also apologized to them at the beginning that we're even doing this game, because we adults have failed so badly.

So, we read from Sun Tzu's "The Art of War," basically how to stay out of it, or how to avoid it if you can, to get a little primer into thinking about it.

And they're tossed into this matrix of problems, simultaneous problems headfirst, with new problems arising every few minutes from random cards.

There's United Nations, arms dealers, World Court, and also World Bank at the corners of the board.

And the fictional teams sit on the sides of the board.

There's even a random entity.

We used to call it the "Weather Goddess," now it's genderless.

Random entity who controls the stock market, the weather, and random things that occur to everyone at all times.

So, you're constantly in a matrix of chaos, volatility, uncertainty and ambiguity.

And the children love it.

They take to it like ducks to water.

It's amazing.

And they've done so well.

Of course, we've gotten invited to the Pentagon.

The documentary film, "World Peace and Other 4th-Grade Achievements," was screened at the United Nations, Google, and so forth.

So, it's been amazing that this structure, something I did not know would work at all, turned out to work so well.

- 45-plus years of teaching The World Peace Games, have the students always found a way to find peace amongst everyone?

- You know, Jacqui, it's strange.

It's almost shocking.

They always, always, always, in games I've played, do.

They find out that compassion is the way to make everything work.

And in our world today, you know, we may have a dearth of that sometimes, but they come through with that equation every single time.

They've almost lost many times.

We have a set amount of time the problems have to be solved satisfactorily.

- There's a timer, right?

Timer's going down.

- Problems have to be solved satisfactorily.

And all countries have to raise their asset value beyond the starting point.

Two things have to happen.

- That's an important part of it, yeah.

- And so if they don't do that, we're not winning.

And so they play until they do.

And somehow they've managed to do it, yeah.

- You say too that, and you said it here, you always apologize to them first, that we've left the world in this state where you need to solve the problems.

45-plus years of saying that to your students, did you ever hope that maybe that's not something you would have to say to them?

- Yeah, we hoped we would never have to say it, or we hoped we'd stop saying it someday.

And every year when I go to play with them, I think, maybe this will be about the time we can sort of settle some of this and they won't have to be put upon to fix what we have done.

You know, we're teaching not just a child in front of us at the game board, we're teaching their children and grandchildren by whatever it is they gain from us or with us.

So, you feel like you're reaching through time, you're reaching through generations, 50, 60 years ahead.

An off gesture, an offhand gesture might be something that carries through, they might teach their great-grandchildren.

"Mr. Hunter, did this gesture about multiple perspectives, and I never forgot it.

And maybe you can use it today" So, it becomes very poignant and very personal what you do when you teach.

And the game is just a vehicle hopefully for getting the students to that place where they feel such care and compassion about the entire world.

- What has surprised you the most about teaching the games all those years?

What has stood out in your mind, maybe as one of the times that really surprised you about how the students interacted with each other, with you around these games?

- Well, you know, as a facilitator of the game, you put yourself in a position of not knowing what's going to happen.

That's built into the rules that I wrote, so, I'm always in an uncertain area.

And learning to live with that uncertainty has become a normal thing.

And, of course, life is uncertain moment to moment, but it's in relation of life.

So, when the students come together and they face that uncertainty and they don't mind, they become happy to have things not clear, so they can bring clarity.

And I think them winning the game in the last few moments, the ecstasy, the incredible overwhelming joy they feel when they physically feel viscerally they have saved the planet.

And some of them from 40 years ago have gone into public service, governmental service, and are actually trying to do that now.

So, that just gives me such a warm feeling that something you do as a teacher might not only affect them, but help others too.

- You mentioned knowing what some of your students are doing now, do they come, how often are your students coming back to you years down the road, and letting you know what those games meant to them, and how it shaped the future of their education, and their careers, and their lives?

- It's a gratifying thing, because as a teacher, when you put your heart and soul into them for a year, or two years, however long, and they leave, you may never see them again.

You don't know.

You lay awake at night wondering, "What happened to this one."

"What happened to that one?"

You do.

And so when they come back through social media, or however now, and they say, "Mr. Hunter, I want to tell you what I'm doing."

I just had an interview with NPR, with Irene Newman, who's doing PhD work in conflict resolution.

And she said, "I played the game.

I did everything.

I broke all the rules, Mr. Hunter.

You let me do it, because that's the way the game works.

And it led me to this And I'm so glad you let me have that chance, especially as a girl."

It's a great thing.

- That's wonderful.

So, the games themselves, I know you've traveled the world teaching them, how often are now educators bringing them into their classrooms, and how passionate are you about making sure that other educators learn what this is and can implement it in their own schools?

- Jacqui, you know, I never had an idea of taking the game anywhere beyond my classroom.

I just do what teachers do, which is you make curriculum as best you can for your students and you hope it works.

And because of Chris Farina, a beautiful independent filmmaker who was introduced to me, this documentary, "World Peace and Other 4th-Grade Achievements" was made and that opened the door for everything.

And so now the game is, we've taught teachers in 42 or 3 countries.

And so the game is played all over the world.

And it's amazing to me to go to Tokyo, and have them be aware of the game, and ready to have me do a game, and to watch them do their games.

Or, to go to Croatia and see it happen.

Or, Austria.

It's an astounding feeling for a teacher.

And you just realize there are teachers far better than you, and they're asking you, can I use your work?

It's a beautiful thing.

- The documentary is being shown here at the NJEA, as well.

Your students have learned so much from you over all those years of teaching, all the time that you have dedicated to bettering young people, what is the most important thing you've learned from your students?

- I'm glad you mentioned that, because they may have learned something from me, but I was really the beneficiary, because I had 30 teachers, and they had one, technically.

And, you know, when you learn as an adult to have them become your peers, your co-creators, your co-teachers, because they've got individual and unique wisdom you don't have, you respect that, you respect them as individuals, then suddenly you've got a learning environment.

Everybody's teaching something all the time.

And once they realize they're empowered by you that way to be themselves, the learning just takes off like a rocket.

You don't have to do anything really as a teacher, because they're in charge.

And they want to be in charge of their academic destiny, which they rarely ever get to do.

So when you let them know that, especially at nine years of age, they're fourth graders, and now we're in middle school, high school, and even college students.

Ethiopian college students just played the game a few months ago.

Ukraine, the teachers are playing the game now, just.

So, the things I've learned is just, you never can think that something is so small that's not very powerful.

It can be a seed, but a tiny apple seed, you can have in a hundred years an orchard of thousands and thousands of trees.

So, even a small seed is important and worthwhile, I think.

- You planted a lot of seeds that I think have grown really in such a beautiful way from all those students that you've taught through all those years.

Thank you for the time you put into education and in our country.

Really appreciate that.

And thank you for taking the time today, so we could learn more about the work you've done, about The World Peace Games.

A really beautiful, interesting, complex concept that I loved learning about.

So, thank you so much, Mr. Hunter.

- Thank you so much.

- So for Jacqui Tricarico, myself and our entire team down in Atlantic City at the 2024 New Jersey Education Association Convention, we thank you so much for watching, We’ll see you next time.

- [Narrator] Think Tank with Steve Adubato is a production of the Caucus Educational Corporation.

Funding has been provided by The New Jersey Education Association.

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New Jersey Sharing Network.

The North Ward Center.

New Brunswick Development Corporation.

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Delta Dental of New Jersey.

The Fidelco Group.

And by Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Promotional support provided by The New Jersey Business & Industry Association.

And by ROI-NJ.

- The EJI Excellence in Medicine Awards was established in 1939, shining a light on New Jersey's health care leaders.

Current awards include the Excellence in Medicine, Research, Medical, Education and Community Service.

EJI also funds annual scholarships to medical, dental, pharmaceutical and physician assistant students throughout the state.

Learn more at EJIAwards.org.