By Lewis Diuguid, Kansas City Star Editorial Columnist

Peace, equity and social justice have to become key parts of education, people at the 19th Annual International Conference of the National Association for Multicultural Education were told Thursday in Denver.

That is not where we are now, said Elavie Ndura-Ouedraogo, associate professor of initiatives in educational transformation at George Mason University. Black and Latino kids are more likely than white kids to be born and live in extreme poverty, are more likely to be uninsured, be incarcerated, drop out of school and be homeless.

Girls also face a matrix of inequities including growing up to earning less than men. Such social justice problems have to be corrected if there is to be peace, said Ndura-Ouedraogo, who spoke during the morning general session.

She praised people pushing for multicultural education for trying to make school curriculum more inclusive, which promotes everyone's humanity.

She said inequities are a global concern. The United Nations declared 2001 to 2010 the International Decade for Cultural Peace. Yet with only a year to go in this decade, peace is "a faint dream," she said.

Ndura-Ouedraogo said the election of Barack Obama a year ago as president gave a lot of people hope. But Obama's election hasn't yet yielded the change people were seeking. It has created "spaces for courageous conversations," Ndura-Ouedraogo said.

"There is no peace without social justice," Ndura-Ouedraogo said. "The quest for peace and the struggle for social justice go hand in hand."

James A. Banks, the luncheon speaker at the convention, said the struggles for social justice, equity and citizenship occur in many countries worldwide. He added that unlike past generations, today's young people are unwilling to surrender their distinct identity to fit others' mindset of who they should be.

The nation has to become more modern in how it views individuals and their human rights, said Banks, a professor of diversity studies and founding director of the Center for Multicultural Education at the University of Washington-Seattle.

Through education, people affirm the identity of others and be as concerned about the deaths of human beings in Iraq and Palestine as they were about Americans in 9-11. "Human beings have a responsibility to each other," Banks said.

He also urged young people to take transformative action to push for justice. He said the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks from the civil rights era were two examples of people who acted against unjust laws because they violated human rights.