Building Peaceable Schools (American University Syllabus)

Building Peaceable Schools

American University

Spring Semester

Prof. Colman McCarthy

On last count by government counters, the United States has 78,000 elementary schools, 28,000 high schools and 3,100 colleges and universities. Some are public, some independent, some religious. Five days a week, about 50 million people walk into U.S. classrooms, putting themselves in the intellectual hands of some 1.8 million teachers. Until age 18 in most states, laws require attendance. By rough estimate, 120,000 students are home-schooled. In all states, public schools are funded by taxes, usually property taxes. The amount per student varies. In Washington D.C., with some 68,000 grade, middle and high school students, the amount is more than $6,000 a student.

Amid all these numbers is one reality: few schools, few teachers, few administrators, few taxpayers, few school boards and few teachers unions are committed to peace education. As a result, most of the 50 million students now in school will one day graduate as peace illiterates.

The solution? A major overhaul of U.S. education. This course is for overhaulers

COURSE TEXTS

Waging Peace in Our Schools by Linda Lantieri and Janet Patti. (Beacon 1996)

The Moral Intelligence of Children by Robert Coles (Penguin 1997)

The Schools Our Children Deserve by Alfie Kohn (Houghton Mifflin 1999)

Solutions to Violence (Center for Teaching Peace 1995)

Strength Through Peace (Center for Teaching Peace 2001)

All of One Peace (Rutgers Press 1996)

Our weekly class meetings will include a fair amount of discussion, debate, dissent and any other kind of fairminded intellectual exchange. Let’s listen well to each other. Listening is an act of caring. Each class is based on readings from the course texts, with the reading assigned at the end of class for the following week’s class. Everyone is expected to read and intellectually absorb the assigned readings and be prepared to discuss them in class. With six course texts and only 14 weekly classes, it’s obvious that not every page of every book will be discussed in class. A choice emerges. Students who want to devour all the books will, those who don’t won’t. Pure education is desire-based, not requirement-based. Our course is really two courses: the structured one that meets Thursday evenings, and the unstructured one where each of you decides what you want to read, think about and act on.

Choose two of these four options:

a 2000 word profile of a teacher. The paper should be based on personal interviews of a grade school or high school teacher of your choosing. Go to a school, sit in on a teacher’s classes, get the feel of the place, and arrange to interview the teacher about his or her background, educational philosophy, the joys and miseries of teaching. It’s best to tape the interview to get the quotes accurately. At the end of the syllabus is a list of DC area teachers worthy of being interviewed and profiled.

Write a second profile of another teacher, perhaps one in your hometown or your old elementary or high school.

A 2000 word book review on any one of the course texts.

Keep a week by week journal based on class discussions, your reflections of the readings, the usefulness of nonviolence in your own life, your thoughts about your own education, your view on how a quality classroom ought to be run.

EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING

Students are strongly encouraged to get classroom experience. This semester I am teaching courses on nonviolence at three local high schools and would welcome anyone to assist me: evaluating student papers, coming to class and helping with the class discussions, teaching classes when I am traveling. The three schools: Wilson High, Nebraska & Albemarle NW (a mile from the AU campus) 10:25 to 11:55 Monday, Wednesday, Friday or Tuesday and Thursday on alternating weeks; School Without Walls High School, 2130 G St. NW, Washington (three blocks from Foggy Bottom Metro) Wednesday 9:45 a.m. to 12 noon; Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School, 4301 East-West Highway, Bethesda, Md., every morning 7:25 a.m. to 8:10 a.m. (three blocks east of Bethesda Metro). A fourth opportunity is Garrison Elementary School, 13th and S Streets, NW, three blocks from U & Cardozo Metro on the Green Line. Many teachers welcome college students coming in and helping children individually with their reading, writing and math. A fifth opportunity is helping out at any other local school where you have already been involved with.

The quality of the writing, plus the effort behind it, counts for much of the final grade, plus what Eddie Stanky, the former Brooklyn Dodgers second baseman, called “the intangibnles”: showing up on time, doing the readings, challenging yourself, challenging the professor, going all out.

The ideal excuse for missing class is a death: yours or mine.

AVAILABILITY

Appointments at convenient times, either on campus or two blocks away at the Center for Teaching Peace, 4501 Van Ness St., Washington DC 20016. 202 537 1372.

TEACHERS TO BE INTERVIEWED

This is a partial list of teachers who could be approached:

John McCarthy, Wilson High, peace studies

Phyllis Wimberly Wilson High, English

Bruce Dahlgren, Wilson High, Social Studies

Stephen Terason, Wilson High, Principal

Nathaniel Mills, Wilson High, Social Studies

Rajeev Kasat, Wilson High, Peace Studies

Marsha Blakeway, National Peace Foundation 202 547-9522

Alex McCarthy, Special Education, Kingsbury Day School 202 232-1702

JoAnn Malone, Blair High School, Silver Spring, Md., Peace Studies

(Blair has several other peace studies or social studies teachers: Freeman, Bogge, Zeh. Contact JoAnn Malone at 301 649-2851)

Mary Finn (taking a year off from Wilson to re-energize)

Elizabeth Samworth, Special Education, Bell Multicultural HS , 3145 Hiatt Pl., NW,

Washington DC 202 673 7314 (Bell is in Adams Morgan)

Mark Lewis, Garrison Elementary, 13th & S Sts., U&Cordozo Metro, 202 673-7263

Hassan Abdullah, Garrison Elementary