Bringing Peace Studies to Missouri

By Colman McCarthy

If it’s true that all governments say they want peace, and that all human hearts yearn for peace, a question arises: should schools be teaching ways to create the peaceable society?

Earning little public attention beyond their campuses, and sometimes even less inside those boundaries, a growing number of schools—at all levels—are answering yes. The Consortium on Peace Research, Education and Development—a national group based at Evergreen State College in Washington—reports that more than 500 undergraduate and graduate programs are in place in over 40 countries. In 1970, only one U.S. school—Manchester College in Indiana—offered a peace studies degree. This year the number exceeds 70, including the University of Missouri-Columbia where Professors John Kultgen, Bill Wickersham and others are teaching peace related courses. Much praise to them, and to the more than 200 students in their classes. They bring honor to MU.

Nationally, as many as 300 colleges and universities sponsor minors or concentrations. The University of San Diego recently received a $25 million gift from Joan Kroc to create a center for peace education.

The message is getting through: unless we teach our children peace, someone else will teach them violence.

The long-term goal of peace education is, broadly put, to reduce violence, whether it is military violence, domestic violence, economic violence, environmental violence or any other kind. Peace education at one school—including high school and elementary schools—may emphasize the practical elements of dispute resolution. At another, diplomacy and security issues are the focus. One school may be intent on stirring students to become the next Dorothy Day or Gandhi. Another may focus on why in America we spend $13 billion a year ($52 each taxpayer) in foreign aid to help the world and $275 billion a year ($1560 apiece in taxes) to fight it.

Peace teachers have no illusions that a few lessons on the philosophy of nonviolence and a required reading list on the literature of peace will cause governments to start stockpiling plowshares, not swords, or that students will instantly convert to Franciscan pacifism. Peace education is in its infancy.

My own involvement began in 1982 when I volunteered to teach a course on nonviolence at a Washington D.C. public high school. The students were able to grasp intellectually what they had already absorbed emotionally: the haunting awareness that their future is threatened, and their present enswamped, by military, family and environmental violence. I have been volunteering at that high school since, and have taken the course to other sites, including Georgetown Law School, the University of Maryland, American University and a prison. I’ve had more than 5,000 students.

Over the years, I have visited hundreds of schools to lecture on nonviolence. Although each peace-teaching school had a different tale about its origins and current program, most were linked by shared realities:

--peace studies teachers had to defend themselves against faculty carpers who dismissed the program as intellectually soft, ideology-driven, or a ruse for reliving the heady 60s.

--peace teachers learned to become world-class scroungers, whether for office space or funding from already impoverished sociology or philosophy departments,

--students at colleges with only a concentration or minor in peace studies were told to be happy with those crumbs, or come back in five years when a new president might be sympathetic to a major.

--students majoring in peace studies were forever being asked by perplexed parents, “You really think you can get a job as a peacemaker?”

--peace teachers wonder why Congress gives more than $700 million a day to the Pentagon—about $8,000 a second—but not a dime to peace education.

Those are the usual obstacles faced by peace educators and peace seekers. No matter. If the path to peace has no obstacles, it probably isn’t leading anywhere anyway.

Colman McCarthy, director of the Center for Teaching Peace in Washington and a former Washington Post columnist whose writing was carried by The Tribune, is speaking Tuesday evening 8 p.m. at Fisher Auditorium in Gannett Hall, UM.