Left at the Center - Essays on Teaching Peace
Left at the Center
By Colman McCarthy
In 25 years of teaching courses on nonviolence, one educational truth has emerged: some of the purest learning happens outside the classroom. I’ve taken students to death row cellblocks, midwife birthing centers, hospital emergency rooms, courtrooms, homeless shelters, congressional offices, as well as peace rallies and antiwar demonstrations.
The result is experiential knowledge, not theoretical. Battered by tests and excessive homework, students often leave school idea rich but experience poor. Many schools process students, as if they are slabs of cheese going to Velveeta High on the way to Cheddar U and Mozzarella Grad School.
After the field trips, it is crucial to come back to the classroom to figure out which government policies allow tax loopholes for corporations to widen while job programs for the poor narrow. Which political decisions direct the federal budget to lavish money on military programs meant to kill rather than to social programs meant to heal. How does legislation get through Congress sanctioning ROTC in high schools and colleges while no federal money goes to peace studies programs in schools. Who is behind federal policies that currently sanction spending $1.3 billion a day on military programs while everyday more than 35,000 people around the world are dying from hunger or preventable diseases.
That’s the hard part for both teachers and students: making the connections between the reality of experiential learning and the reality of politics, and then getting the skills to keep working at both.
Women as Peacemakers
As any teacher of peace studies or conflict resolution well knows, it is usually women who are the superior students. They tend to write better papers, they dive deeper into the course texts, they keep class discussions lively, they want to read more books on peace and they hang around after class to ask more questions.
Why is this? Do women have peace genes floating around inside them? Hardly. It’s more basic than that. Women are more victimized by violence, and victims are passionate about finding solutions.
In the United States, the leading cause of injury to women is being physically harmed by a man they know: husband or boyfriend, ex-husband, ex-boyfriend. It’s no accident that we have battered women’s shelters but no battered men’s shelters. It’s much the same internationally. The United Nations Development Fund for Women reports that in Syria 25 percent of married women have been beaten by their husbands. In the world’s war zones, which number more than 40, most refugees are women. In the current patriarchal political structures, it is women who suffer economic violence. Oxfam America reports that as much as 90 percent of the world’s female workforce is not protected by labor laws.
Whether in the ranks of Code Pink, at the gates of Greenham Common or on the plazas of Buenos Aires, women peacemakers have been self reliant in their calls to action. Finally, the world is noticing. In the last 30 years, nine women have won the Nobel Peace Prize. In the previous 75, it went to only three.
If the nation’s 78,000 elementary schools and 31,000 high schools ever became centers of peace education--the good news is that some are--students would know of the heroism of the women Nobelists : Bertha von Suttner, Jane Addams, Emily Balch, Mairead Corrigan, Betty Williams, Mother Teresa, Alva Myrdal, Aung San Suu Kyi, Rigoberta Menchu, Jody Williams, Shirin Ebadi and Wangari Maathi.
Think, too, of the women who have been honored in other ways, by carrying on their work: Jeannette Rankin, Dorothy Day, Maria Montessori, Helen Nearing, Eunice Shriver, among many others
With those sisters and their deeds as inspiration, women are taking action on the thought of sociologist Wilma Scott Heide: “We will no longer be led by that half of the population whose socialization through toys, games, values and expectations, sanctions violence as the final assertion of manhood and nationhood.”
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
Vietnam and Iraq
The U.S invasion of Vietnam began in 1962. Forty years later, it was the invasion of Iraq. The similarities are striking. Here are some.
Lyndon Johnson, 1966: “If we don’t stop the Reds in South Vietnam, tomorrow they will be in Hawaii, and next week they will be in San Francisco.”
George W Bush, 2003: “Our military is confronting terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan and in other places so our people will not have to confront terrorist violence in New York or St. Louis or Los Angeles.”
In 1966 Lyndon Johnson alleged that a North Vietnamese boat attacked a U.S. vessel in the Gulf of Tonkin. It turned out to be false but a believing Congress--with only two dissents-- passed a resolution sanctioning Johnson’s war plans. George W. Bush justified invading Iraq because it brimmed with WMD (false); it was an imminent threat to the U.S. (false); it had been trying to buy nuclear material from Niger (false); links existed between Iraq and Al Qaeda (false); victory would be a Bush pal called “a cakewalk.” (false).
The corporate owned media not only endorsed both invasions but dispatched its big names to give favorable coverage. Walter Cronkite of CBS joined a flight crew in a bombing run over North Vietnam.
Ted Koppel of ABC joined an Army convoy in Iraq. Wearing military fatigues, neither media star asked hard questions of their new war buddies.
Lyndon Johnson vowed to stay the course in Vietnam. On January 12, 1967, he told Congress: “We face more costs, more loss and more agony.” On July 14, 2004, Donald Rumsfeld said “Are more people going to be killed? You bet.” Twelve days earlier Bush said: “Bring ‘em on. We got the force necessary.”
America’s knowledge of Vietnam’s culture, history, language, literature and religions was nil. Ignorance then about a Buddhist country is matched now by ignorance of an Islamic country with roots in the 7,000 Mesopotamian civilization.
The upper class enclaves of Chevy Chase, La Jolla, Grosse Point and Scarsdale were not the military’s manpower base for Vietnam nor are they for Iraq.
Robert McNamara, a prime architect of the Vietnam War, left to head the World Bank. Paul Wolfowitz, a prime promoter of the Iraq war, left to head the World Bank. Both men, well-educated intellectuals, left government to think of ways to better the lot of people after first using their minds on how best to efficiently kill people.
A leading Congressional voice to stop funding the Vietnam War was Sen. George McGovern. The strongest voice to stop funding the Iraq War is Rep. Jim McGovern..