We are all familiar with the Red Cross and Red Crescent symbols which serve to warn off and prohibit armed groups and military forces from attacking places identified as medical facilities.

To increase awareness of the increasing targeted attacks on schools in conflict-affected regions, and to help publicize the issue discussed by Bede Sheppard of Human Rights Watch in his compelling lecture in Ann Arbor in the fall of 2010, A2Ethics.org invited students and area residents to create and to offer up their own universal symbols that identify education as a no violence area and zone of peace. Almost 100 students, most of them from Ann Arbor Greenhills School, contributed their visions of what a school protective symbol should look like.

Ideally, this symbol would prevent attacks on any school the world over and would be come to be regarded as a universal symbol recognized by all and used by all. Below are several of the symbols contributed by high school seniors at Ann Arbor Greenhills School and submitted by a student at the University of Michigan.    

All of the symbols for the exhibit are the creative property of the individuals who designed them. For information on the exhibitors and their specific designs, please email us at: [email protected]. You can also look at the universal symbols submitted by middle school students.