Getting a Peace Studies Course Approved -- A Case Study

Getting Started

Since its first days in 1986, the main goal of the Center for Teaching Peace has been getting courses on nonviolence and peace studies into schools. What’s hard about that, it might be asked. Isn’t everyone for peace? They are, but schools are for teaching math, science, literature, music, art. A letter came recently to Colman McCarthy from Paul Wack, a teacher whose efforts reveal how persistence is needed to get just one peace course into one school in one town.

Dear Colman:

I’m an English teacher at Niles West High School in Skokie, a suburb just north of Chicago. I’m writing to let you know that our district, somewhat miraculously, approved a peace studies course. Here is the full story.

I have had a lifelong interest in peace studies and peace education, most likely due to my father who is a World War II veteran and retired English professor. He is a lifelong liberal in the Howard Zinn and Jonathan Kozo mold.

To what my father gave me, I added an interest in liberation theology (I am Roman Catholic) and Buddhism.

From that, I was driven to learn about human rights violations in Central America and elsewhere, and Buddhism has taught me to focus on inner peace. In Chicago I have had the privilege of knowing Kathy Kelly of Voices for Creative Nonviolence, and have brought her to my school several times. For years I was the faculty moderator of a student peace group, which has become a student chapter of Amnesty International.

Due to your book, “I’d Rather Teach Peace,” I had the idea of starting a peace course in our district. I ordered your two collections of peace essays several years ago, and you wrote back an encouraging letter.

It takes a long time to get a course started here, with many institutional hoops to jump through. Two other teachers and I put a proposal together which at first was rejected. It was too “social studies” oriented. We are all, incidentally, English teachers.

Our second proposal, titled “The Literature of Peace,” was accepted by the school board. This was the miraculous part. Because the course is part of the English curriculum, we will be teaching more literature--poetry, short stories drama—than you would in yours.

We begin teaching the course this Fall. With two high schools in our district, we will have one course in each.

I would love to keep in touch with you as we go through this process. The three of us are new at this and we want to do the best we can to make sure the courses become popular and continue. I would love to see it blossom into a school wide peace studies program involving our entire curriculum. We are only at the first step.

In closing, I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for your work, because your writings inspired me to get this course going. I hope this letter explains what is happening in peace education in District 219, Niles Township High Schools, Skokie, Illinois.

Peace, Paul Wack.

Until I check the AAU indoor record book for the fastest time anyone has created a peace studies course, I’m guessing you are close to medalling. It’s usually years, years and years between a proposal and the day students walk into a class.

I remember speaking before a school board trying to persuade it to approve peace studies courses in the county’s 22 high schools. All went well until one of the school board members interrupted. He was troubled by the name “peace studies.” Studies was okay, but peace might cause problems once the public was told. Could I come up with a more palatable name.

Had a reporter been covering, you can imagine the next day’s headline: “Peace Course Threatens Public Calm and Stability.”

In a rational world, which evolutionists say is a million or two years away, schools would be putting peace courses into all schools at all levels. Yet here we are in the U.S. where only a few of the nation’s 78,000 elementary school, 31,000 high schools and 3,000 colleges and universities offer courses in alternatives to violence, much less fully fund major programs.

You’ve done well in Skokie. Keep in mind that the trouble with a good idea is that it soon degenerates into hard work. Enjoy your degeneracy!

All the best, and be the best of all,

Colman McCarthy