“No, I’d Rather Teach Peace” -- The Origin Story

“No, I’d Rather Teach Peace”

By Colman McCarthy

In early spring 1982, an English teacher at School Without Walls, a District of Columbia public high school where two of my children were students, invited me to speak to her class on the techniques of writing. At the time, I had been a columnist for The Washington Post for 14 years, and would be for another 14. Five blocks from the White House—no school is closer—“Walls,” as its 300 students call it, specializes in experiential learning. Study zoology by interning at the National Zoo, or politics by working one day a week in a congressional office, or drama by volunteering at the Kennedy Center.

After speaking to the English literature class about writing, I told the teacher how enjoyable her students were during the give-and-take discussion. I mentioned, too, my satisfaction in being with them, almost a therapeutic break from the daily solitariness of writing. It wasn’t empty banter. I meant it. The exhilaration was real. The teacher, a seasoned veteran who had a talent for bluff-calling, said that if I really found the visit to her class so enlivening, why not come back in the Fall to offer my own course. Go beyond gushing, was her message.

“You could teach writing,” she said. Impulsively, I replied, “no, I’d rather teach peace.”

Months later in the opening week of the Fall semester, I was in a Walls classroom as a volunteer teacher with 25 students. The course, based on the literature of peace, was titled Alternatives to Violence. We met weekly from l p.m. to 3:30. I made up the time at The Post by not taking lunch breaks during the week, not that anyone much noticed. Who cares where columnists spend their hours as long as the copy comes in on time. Journalistically, I was creating my own education beat. Classroom teaching was my legwork. Instead of waiting for the Brookings Institution or the Heritage Foundation to issue still another report on the state of American education—dismal, predictably—and then writing a column on the findings of the alleged experts, I could ignore the shallow-end think tank gab and draw on my own experiences in a public school. I could seek an answer to a question that long gripped me: can peaceaking be taught, and learned? If peace is what every government claims to be seeking, and if peace is what every human heart yearns for, could it have a place in our school curricula?

Educationally, I learned that my students were hungry to explore the unknown landscape of pacifism, nonviolence, and peaceful conflict resolution. I learned, also, and a bit unsettlingly, that I was equally hungry to teach it. I was in my mid-40s, ready to diversify intellectually and see what unused brain cells might be activated.

A balance was created between my writing life and my teaching life: one was thinking in private meant for a large reading audience, the other was thinking in public for a small listening audience—those 25 kids I spent that year with. They were openminded, spirited and appreciative, a bracing mix of idealists and skeptics. Many were from low-income neighborhoods and who saw Walls as the escape route from poverty. Some came from moneyed families—second generation escapees--that had ample funds for private schools but not a liking for their insularity.

The course went well. I returned for a second and third year. After establishing the course at Walls, I turned the class over to a succession of college students that I trained. They were welcomed by a principal who believed that a person’s passion for education meant more than a folder of teaching certificates. I took the course to another District high school—Woodrow Wilson--and stayed two years. I turned the course over, first, to my son Jim, a new Notre Dame graduate, and then to another son, John, a baseball coach and former minor league knuckleball pitcher who has taught the course for the past six years as a volunteer.

In 1987, with Walls and Wilson in place, I was invited to teach a daily 7:30 a.m. class at a suburban Washington school. Once again, I had been challenged by an educator to stop talking and begin doing. I had given a speech to an annual conference of Maryland high school principals and assistant principals. Why aren’t you offering courses on the history, theory and practice of nonviolence? I asked. During the Q&A, a principal said she would like to put a course in place “if you’ll come teach it.” The next semester I was volunteering for a daily 7;30 a.m class at Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School.

The same year, Robert Pitofsky, dean of Georgetown University Law Center, welcomed my proposal to design and teach a course called “Law, Conscience and Nonviolence.” A year earlier, I began offering a similar course in the General Honors program at the University of Maryland. In 1995, the Washington Center, an educational non-profit that brings college students to the capital for a semester of internships and courses, invited me to teach a class. The next year, I left The Post to give full time to my students. I added one more class—a seminar on nonviolence at a juvenile prison—at the Oak Hill Youth Center in Laurel, Md. During summers, I kept the Washington Center course going, as well as a 6 week mini-course for college students interning in the city.

By rough estimate, I’ve had more than 5,000 students since that first high school class. I’ve felt blessed. With all of them, from the brainiest third year law students on their way to six figure beginning salaries on K Street to 16-year-old illiterates locked up on homicide charges, I emphasized one theme: alternatives to violence exist and, if individuals and nations can organize themselves properly, nonviolent force is always stronger, more enduring and, assuredly, more moral than violent force.

Some students opened their minds to this immediately. They understood Gandhi; “Nonviolence is the weapon of the strong.” They believed King: “The choice is not between violence and nonviolence but between nonviolence and nonexistence.”

Other students have had doubts which I encouraged them to express. They did, repeatedly. Nonviolence and pacifism are beautiful theories and ideals, they said, but in the real world, where muggers and international despots lurk, let’s keep our fists cocked and our bombs ready.

All I asked of the realists was to think about life’s two risks: do you depend on violent force or nonviolent force to create peace? Not just peace in some vague “out there,” but peace in our homes where spouse and child abuse is rampant, or peace in the developing world where some 35,000 children die everyday from preventable diseases, or peace in those parts of the world where more than 40,000 people die every month in some 35 wars or conflicts, or peace where the U.S. Congress gives $700 million a day to the Pentagon, which is $8,000 a second and three times more than the Peace Corps budget for a year.

If violence were effective, peace would have reigned eons ago.

At all schools, my course was based on the literature of peace—the writings of past and current peacemakers. I created my own textbook—Solutions to Violence—which ran deep with 16 chapters that included Gandhi, Tolstoy, Dorothy Day, Gene Sharp, Jeannette Rankin, Joan Baez, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Daniel Berrigan and ranged from women and nonviolence to animal rights. The book was published by the Center for Teaching Peace, a non-profit my wife Mavourneen and I began in l985. With generous foundation support, our work is to help schools at all levels offer courses on the methods, practitioners, effectiveness and history of nonviolent conflict resolution. In my classes, essays are read, discussed and debated. My goal was not to tell students what to think but how to think: gather as much information as possible about nonviolence, and then either embrace or reject it. I went with the thought of Peter Kropotkin, the Russian anarchist who advised students in Mutual Aid: “Think about the kind of world you want to live and work in. What do you need to build that world? Demand that your teachers teach you that.”

The students I’ve been with these 20 years are looking for a world where it becomes a little easier to love and a lot harder to hate, where learning nonviolence means that we dedicate our hearts, minds, time and money to a commitment that the force of love, the force of truth, the force of justice and the force or organized resistance to corrupt power is seen as sane, and the force of fists, guns, armies and nukes insane.

As a lifelong pacifist, and with increasing leanings toward the philosophy of nonviolent anarchism, my early hunches are regularly confirmed. Yes, peacemaking can be taught, the literature is large and growing Yes, the young are passionately seeking alternatives to violence. Yes, our schools should be educating as much about peacemakers as peacebreakers. Yes, whether the killing and harming are done by armies, racists, corporations, polluters, domestic batterers, street thugs or boardroom thugs, animal exploiters or others in this graceless lot, the cycle of violence can be broken—but only if the choices are laid out, starting in the nation’s 78,000 elementary schools, 31,000 high schools and 3,000 colleges. The choices: are we on the side of the bombers or the bombed? Caesar or Christ? Napolean or St Francis? Henry Kissinger or Daniel and Phil Berrigan? The School of the Americas or the slain Jesuits? Colin Powell or Dorothy Day? Saddam Hussein or The Catholic Worker? The American Cattlemen’s Association or the Fund for Animals? Lockheed Martin or the Fellowship of Reconciliation? The Pentagon or the War Resisters League? Attackers or victims? Executioners or the executed?

The following pages tell part of the story of teaching courses on peace at six schools, beginning in September 2000 and ending in May 2001. It is a journal, month by month—part reporting, part reflection and part an exploration of human possibilities. What should be the moral purpose of writing if not to test ideals that can help fulfill the one possibility we all hope for, the peaceable society? For me, any other kind of writing would be no more than secretarial work. Why bother?

Colman McCarthy

Washington DC

September 2000

Georgetown Law

Martin Buber said that “All real living is meeting.” Opening classes are for that. Sixteen second and third year students have signed on. Some years, the number has been 20. Others 12. In the catalogue, the course title--“Law, Conscience and Nonviolence”--is something less than a grabber for those hot to make to make partner at Swaine, Cravath & Moore in 10 years. Their yen is for boardroom law, fixer law, Washington insider law, Exxon Oil law, loophole law. And after a decade or so of 70 and 80 work weeks, wearied and torn, they’ll ask themselves, what for? Between the age of 30 and 45, lawyers have the highest rate of career shifts.

When my law students dress up and go out every Fall for job interviews at firms next summer, they tell me that managing partners almost always look at the courses on the transcript, and ask: “what’s this one all about, this ‘Law, Conscience and Nonviolence?’ That’s actually a course?’” The partner’s eyebrow rises: hire summer associates with a conscience? The students squirm. Damn. All was going well until then. They think fast. They say their girlfriend or boyfriend was in the class, and that was the only time to see each other—amid eight hours a day of studying torts, taxes, evidence and corporate law. Yes, yes, says the MP. Understandable.

I use the first class to relax everyone. Socialize a bit. Introduce ourselves, share a few stories, have a laugh or two. Going around the room, I ask each student about their educational background. The first two or three say Yale, Chapel Hill, Stanford.

No, no, I say: Where did you go to elementary school? The question throws them. Elementary school? They have to think, remembering. We spend eight years of our lives in kindergarten, first grade, second grade and on up, during the most formative time of our lives when more than 80 percent of our character is formed, and rarely are we asked about it I ask. Who was your favorite grade school teacher? Have you any friends from those days? Did you think about being a lawyer in third grade? Soon, the class is enjoying all this, but all the time wondering what kind of an oddball professor this is to be dwelling on elementary school.

Maybe it’s a bias, I explain, but I believe that elementary school teachers do the heavy lifting of American education. The best have courage and inner resilience the rest of us can only imagine. By comparison, college teaching, and certainly law school teaching, is a balmy breeze of summer: no sweat, no strain. The almighty profs never look for lost rain coats in the cloak room, they don’t take care of runny noses, they don’t have lunch room duty. A student has a problem? See the TA after class.

I admire elementary school teachers immensely. I urge everyone in the class to take a few minutes in the coming week to write a letter to an old grade school teacher that they remember with affection, and say thanks.

By now, everyone is relaxed, and then some. The class wit has been identified. The class orator, too, along with the quiet ones who by the end of the course will be doing more talking than they dreamed.

Georgetown Law is the country’s largest law school, with more than 1500 students and 8,000 applicants a year. My tiny class—hundreds sign up every semester for corporate law courses—attracts students who are shopping around for a philosophy of the law, not merely a career in it. I try to ground them in Gandhi who believed in reconciliation law, not adversarial law. During his early years as a lawyer in South Africa, he wrote: “My joy was boundless. I had learnt the true practice of law. I had learnt to find out the better side of human nature and to enter men’s hearts. I realized that the true function of a lawyer was to unite parties riven asunder. The lesson was indelibly burnt into me that a large part of my time during the twenty years of my practice as a lawyer was occupied in bringing about private compromises of hundreds of cases. I lost nothing thereby—not even money, certainly not my soul.”

We discuss this for a few minutes. Many in the class had no idea that Gandhi was even a lawyer, and some were totally unfamiliar with him in any way. Maybe it’s time for the companies that charge kids up to $1,000 for LSAT review courses to throw in a few sample questions on Gandhi’s legal theory.

Class time is only two hours. It’s not much. We could spend a full semester on Gandhi’s life and thoughts alone. For the following week, I ask everyone to read the chapter on Dorothy Day, the co-founder of The Catholic Worker and, like Gandhi, a lawbreaker and jailbird. Before leaving, I tell the class that I’d be grateful if they would work on two assignments: don’t let a day go by without telling someone you love them, and

write a letter to someone you owe a favor to. Maybe that elementary school teacher.

Oak Hill Youth Center , Laurel, Md.

It’s called “a youth center” but, from the two rows of razor wire atop 20 ft. high chain link fences that go for about a mile around 70 acres of rural property, it’s a prison. The inmates are nearly all black teenagers sent here by District of Columbia Superior Court judges. The name “Oak Hill” has become synonymous with mismanagement, failed hopes and no positive results. One administration after another has come in with hopes of reform and then left with conditions worse. In the mid-1990s, Oak Hill was placed in receivership by the Superior Court, which meant administrative decisions would have to be reviewed by a judge. The education program was turned over to a pair of professors from the University of Maryland’s school of education. I heard about it and, in the summer of 1998, offered to come out—a 60 mile round trip and over 60 traffic lights, all uncoordinated—to teach nonviolent conflict resolution for an hour a week.

It wasn’t much but at least it has kept me in touch with people whose lives I need to know about, prisoners. Most of the kids were born unwanted, raised unloved, have lived in kill-or-be-killed neighborhoods and have few memories of secure and happy moments in their lives. They have reading problems, impulse control problems, rage problems.

I have no illusions that I can teach them much about nonviolence. I keep reminding myself: go out to Oak Hill and just be kind to those kids, and you’ll be doing plenty. Of course, I don’t walk and tell the eight or nine kids with whom I sit together in a circle “Here I am again, Mr. Kindness. Soak it up, children, and do evil no more.” Instead, it’s just going back week after week . I bring an essay to read—something by Martin Luther King, Jr. on forgiveness, or a few lines from Gandhi, perhaps a poem by Gwendolyn Brooks, an essay by Claude McKay—and get the kids to talk about it.

This Fall, I have a class in 9B, a unit for kids in protective custody. I never ask anyone what he’s in for. On the outside, we don’t ask anyone what kind of messes they’ve been in. Why on the inside? The youngest member of the class is 11. He rarely sits still. He doesn’t speak, he blurts. He can’t look at a page for more than five seconds. He makes eye contact with someone and shouts out, “why you looking at me, dumb nigger.”

Do I ask a guard to take him away? Or try to engage him so he’ll gain a bit by being in the group? I’ve tried both, with few signs either way that he’s the better for it.

On a trip to Knoxville a few weeks ago, to give a talk to a group of social workers, a teacher at a Tennessee youth prison told me that she, too, had an 11-year-old black boy in her literacy class: “He was a sullen kid most of the time but the other day he was cheery and talkative. I ask him why he was feeling so good. He told me that he just heard that his daddy had gotten out of prison, ‘and that’s why I’m happy.’ Then he looks up at me and says, ‘weren’t you happy when your daddy got out of prison.’”

At Oak Hill, it’s much the same. Whenever the topic of fathers comes up, most will say that he’s in or has been in prison. Few know where their fathers are now.

It isn’t much better with female inmates and their mothers. Last year, I taught in the girls’ section of the prison.

One afternoon, a 15-year-old came running into the group joyously. “I just had a call from my lawyer,” she announced. “He got the judge to release me in two weeks.” I said congratulations, and asked what’s the first thing she would be doing when she went home.

“Gonna get drunk, “ she said.

“Why that?” I asked.

“I’m an alcoholic, that’s what alcoholics do. We get drunk.”

“When did you start drinking?”

She thought a moment, and said, “I guess when I was about eight…”

Astonished, I interrupted her and said, “when you were eight years old?”

“Oh no, when I was eight months old.”

She told the story. Her mother, 14 years old, overwhelmed by the demands of infant care, didn’t know how to her baby to go off to sleep at night. But she had a girlfriend, an experienced mother at 16, who did know: Give the baby a bottle of apple juice and spike it with gin, and the baby will go off to sleep real quick.”

The Washington Center

Thirty two students, all of them with semester-long internships at federal agencies, public interest groups or congressional offices, show up at 5 p.m. for a three hour weekly class. Their home colleges range from big-name to no-name schools: the Ivies, Little Ivies and Poison Ivies. It’s no difference to me. On the subject of nonviolence, all are in the same state of unawareness. None has ever taken a peace studies course.

I try to save the students some money by ordering the two course texts myself at a discounted price and carting them in on a dolly. The bookstore markup is avoided. After distributing “Solutions To Violence” and “All of One Peace: Essays in Nonviolence,” a few students open their checkbooks and ask “how much?”

I reply, “You decide.”

Jaws drop, eyebrows rise, eyes widen. There is disbelief. A minor hubbub erupts, threatening to turn major. It goes on for nearly a minute. After the confusion runs its course, and everyone stops talking to his or her neighbor, a student--from Vanderbilt—raises her hand and asks, “What if we don’t know how much to pay?”

I don’t offer much help: “You decide.”

More talk, more confusion. Another of the perplexed—from Stonehill College—asks: “But what if I give you $20 for the two books and someone else gives you $40?”

“You decide.”

Another, from Texas Christian University: “What if we pay you nothing?”

“You decide.”

One more, from Florida State: “You’re the professor. It’s your job to determine the price.”

“You decide.”

Clearly, none in the class had ever taken a course that granted this much pocketbook power. These, and all students, have been conditioned to pay whatever someone orders them to, sheep herded around the academic marketplace, with never a bleat of protest. Book sales to college students is a racket: profiteering off a captive market, with little accountability to buyers. The odds favor the colleges: they are full timer sellers with power over part time buyers.

I let the class go at 7:45, to leave l5 minutes for individual loose ends to be tied. Some students come up with checks. They range from $23 to $45. One hands me a note saying he wants to look through the books more thoroughly and will bring some money next week. Some say they’ll pay at the end of the course.

I congratulate them all: they’re deciding.

Stone Ridge Sacred Heart School for Girls, Bethesda Md.

At first, it doesn’t appear as if anything extraordinary is going on. Eighteen high school seniors are in the classroom, part of a consortium program involving five private schools in lower Montgomery County, one of the nation’s wealthiest. The schools are Stone Ridge, Holton-Arms, Holy Child, Landon and St. Andrews.

A half-dozen electives are offered every year in the consortium, ranging from Mandarin to AP calculus. After speaking at a student assembly, I was invited by the headmaster at Landon to teach my course on nonviolence. Last year, the site was Landon, this year Stone Ridge.

I am in awe of the 16 girls and two boys who signed up: they come in at 7:l0 a.m. A few live in the Stone Ridge neighborhood across the street from the National Institutes of Health, but most need to be up by 6 a.m. and leave time for the drive to school. Seeing them walk into class , I wonder, in deep admiration, about the large reserves of self-discipline they must be drawing on. Then, too, what motivates that self-discipline?

Plenty of high schools, public and private, have their small bands of go-getters but these are mostly the extracurricular whizzes who belong to four clubs, play two varsity sports and effortlessly rack up hundreds of community service hours—all of it after school.

To be an early riser at age 17 or 18—only a few do it. To the question, why is this group here at this hour, my hunch is desire.

Some confirmation came when I asked everyone to write their answers to a list of questions I had--some benign probings that would let me learn something about each student. One of the questions was, why are you taking the course and what do want to get out of it?

These are among the written replies that came back the next morning:

--I have always admired Gandhi, since the 7th grade. I believe that nonviolence is the most effective way to get what I want: a just world. I want to learn about the history of nonviolent action. There is a whole side of history/social studies which I have not been exposed to. This class will be my vehicle to take me out to the real world and how to confront injustice. I will hopefully take what I learn and bring it to my activist groups and we can be more productive. Most of all, I want to be inspired.

--I’m tired of learning about wars and violent revolutions and never learning the peaceful alternatives.

--All my life I have been taught that war is passion, that people who flee from the draft are cowards, that it is noble to fight for your country. I am interested to know the arguments from the other side.

--I am interested in contributing in some way to making a more peaceful society. I’m hoping to gain the skills and knowledge to do so. Also, I hope that we will have many active discussions and debates, which seem to be absent in most high school classes.

--I am taking this course because I am ashamed of humanity. We seem to be focused on the sole purpose of killing and destroying all that is great and beautiful, including ourselves. I hope that I can become a better person and make a difference in this world.

--On a superficial level, I signed up with the intention to improve my problem-solving skills, to learn to share my opinion more openly, and to improve my writing. On a deeper level, I’m here to gain a greater awareness about the world, to learn how I can help, and to further my own spirituality.

--I’m taking this course to broaden my view of the political spectrum. I hope to gain a more open mind toward the political views of others. I tend to be extremely set in my ways, which are mostly conservative, and I hope that by taking this class I will be able to full comprehend the pacifist viewpoint.

--I need to learn more about the world I live in. I want to have to think about my personal views and challenge them.

--I am the type of person who believes that there is room for self-improvement everyday. For that reason, I don’t really have many firm convictions of where I stand on issues. That is not to say that I am apathetic. I am not well-educated on the subject of nonviolence, but I love learning new perspectives and views. I am taking this course out of pure interest. And to be honest, I am really sick of regular courses geared toward an AP exam.

I’m blessed to have these children with me for the coming year. The last reply, from the student sick of fake academic rigor, I let her know that I’m weary, too, of that style of education and that my course would steer as far away from it as possible. During the first week of class, I leveled with the kids. I told them that grading, testing and homework are all but useless, and that all three are forms of academic violence that will be deemphasized here.

That might have had them break-dancing in the aisles or on top of the desks for the more agile ones. But I urged them not be fooled: this will be the most difficult, the most challenging and possibly the most infuriating course you’ll ever take. Because it’s desire-based, not fear-based, and the desire must come from within you. The desire to push yourself, because it leads to inner growth that can’t be measured by grades, tests or homework. Only you can measure the honesty and intensity of your desire.

Grading, testing and homework represent teaching by fear. Scare kids into learning. Score well on tests, goes the meritocratic message, and pathways to success widen. Do poorly and they narrow. Kowtow to a teacher’s demands for test preparation, no matter how rote the drilling, or spend hours writing irrelevant papers, and the slavishness will pay off. So it is claimed. And at the end of the course, parents can ask, if they ask at all, not what was learned in the course but “What did you get on the final exam and what’s your final grade?”

And the illusion of excellence remains. The heavier a kid’s book-crammed backpack on leaving school, the more the kid is learning Fear-based learning works for awhile—until the course ends, when test-givers and graders can no longer intimidate and the once-intimidated are paroled.

Schools are peopled by two kinds of teachers: those who want power over their students and those who seek power with. The power-over set are mind-controllers who preach that academic excellence demands a high price, with payments coming in the form of academic suffering: tough tests, rigid grading standards and heaps of homework.

Teachers who seek power with also believe in excellence, but that it must come from self-demand, not teacher-demand.

I understand the riskiness of this approach to education. Some kids will see my course as the ultimate gut-course, a pure blow-off. That’s fine. They are likely to be the ones who, in conventional tests-grades-homework courses, learn how to manipulate the system by obeying orders to perform but doing it with no heart. They have been conditioned to believe that successful performance in school assures successful achievement in life. But Walker Percy’s line keeps intruding on this fantasy: you can make all As and go out and flunk life. In 20 years, I have seen enough 4.0s pass through my courses, and l0 or l5 years later to be living wildly messed-up lives, to know the truth of that. And to know, too, that the kids who could make demands on themselves and give full effort to reading and writing about ideas and issues they cared about ended up as self-assured and self-giving adults. I teach not to help students become thinking people but to become thinking and caring people.

My main challenge at Stone Ridge is to help each girl and boy to relax. I promise them this: I will never start off a class with the grossest turn-off words ever uttered by a teacher, “Students, we have a lot of ground to cover today.” I ask the class to themselves, and me, a favor: when they hear teachers say that, stand up and tell them to go become the cross-country coach.

The University of Maryland.

On Monday afternoons from 12:20 to 3 in a seminar room in Anne Arundel Hall, 18 students in the General Honors Program are ready to go. All were invited to be in the honors program, based on their high school records. The course offerings range from the exotic—the McDonaldization of Society, the Cultural Significance of Astronomy—to the basic: the Solar System, the Writing Workshop. In the course description booklet or Honors courses, mine is advertised with this note, among others: “Class discussions are expected, and dissent is welcomed. One skeptic enlivens the class more than a dozen passive agreers.”

To get the discussion started, and rousingly so, I begin the class with a quiz—this being a gathering of intellectuals for whom aceing quizzes is as easy as Tiger Woods making birdies. But it’s a quiz with a difference. I open my wallet and pull out a $100 bill, announcing that whoever can identify the six people whose names I’m about to call out wins the $100. They look at each other. Is this for real? Is the $100 bill real?

I begin the quiz. Who is Robert E. Lee? All hand shoot up: the general who led the Confederate side in the Civil War. Everyone is one for one. Who is Ulysses S. Grant? The general who led the Union side. All hands rise. Who is Norman Schwartzkopf? The general who won the Persian Gulf War. Everyone is three for three, and looking good.

Who is Jeannette Rankin? No hands go up. Who is Dorothy Day? No one stirs. Who is Jody Williams? No one knows.

The class wit—a finance major, it turns out—asks if he entitled to $50 because the knew the first three.

Nix. The game was all six or nothing.

I’ve done this $100 bill quiz hundreds of times, before students in classrooms, before students in large assemblies and before large audiences of educators. No one’s ever won the $100. It’s safe money. It’s safe, too, that everyone will know the first three, but not the last three. They know the peacebreakers but not the peacemakers. They know the men who want to solve conflicts by killing but not the women who believe in loving.

My Honorable students didn’t need to have it explained. By the end of the course, I told them, you’ll know all about Rankin, Day and Williams. Hey, calls out the class wit, do we get the same quiz?

School Without Walls

Sometimes I wonder if this school wasn’t named presciently: it may soon be without walls. The three story building, which seems to be tilting a half-degree a year, goes back to the Grant administration. It’s the oldest structure in the neighborhood, on G Street between 21st and 22nd. Five blocks east is the White House, five blocks west the Watergate apartments. Power one direction, money the other, and in between an impoverished public high school serving some 200 students.

I have nine of them: three sophomores, three juniors, three seniors. Four blacks, five whites, five girls, four boys. One of the senior boys, who went with his Unitarian Church group to the peace conference last year at the Hague, is taking the course for the second time. He is voracious about the literature of peace. To get him into class again—the regs say that courses that are passed can’t be repeated--we had to strategize a bit. I changed the name of the course from “Alternatives to Violence” to “Solutions to Violence.” That was enough to fool the computers, plus the papercrats .

For icebreaking, I announce a game: red car, green car. In an earnest voice—always be earnest the first day of school—I ask the students to leave their seats, walk down the hall and stairs and go out the front door. Stand there for l0 minutes and count all the cars passing on G Street that are either red or green. Count them as accurately as possible. After 10 minutes, come back and I’ll have two questions.

Obediently, the nine march out. I look from the window. There they are, counting the reds and greens. Two are writing in notebooks. This is no moment for sloppy counting.

As they walk in, I overhear them comparing numbers. “Five green, seven red? No four green, eight red. You sure? Absolutely, I can count.”

They quiet themselves, ready for question number one. Didn’t anyone think that was a bit stupid standing there counting red cars and green cars? “Yeah, I did,” says one of the bright lights. “Me, too,” adds another.

Question two: if you thought it was so stupid, why’d you do it? Why not tell me to go count the cars? Why didn’t you say no I won’t go?

As with my Honors students at Maryland, the point wasn’t missed here either. Don’t cooperate with abusive power. When it tells you to do something stupid, say no. When it tells you to believe that armies are effective, say no. When it tells you that competition improves character, say no. When it tells you that governments tell the truth, say no.

When it tells you that violence solves problems, say no.

I do the red car, green car often, sometimes perversely. At a midwest university I was invited to speak to an audience of graduate students in journalism. They were getting their masters degrees, learning how to furrow their brows like Ted Koppell on Nightline. The school even offered a three credit course on Brow Furrowing for the future Teds.

It was raining out that day, a torrent.

I asked the students to go count cars—for 20 minutes. In the downpour. They did. They came back soaked and drenched. Even sheep wouldn’t have done that.

They weren’t in much of a mood for my lecture. Small wonder that many in the media are so suckered or snookered by power. Few dare to resist the seductions, few question the inanities that pass for political wisdom.

At Walls, the kids enjoyed the little exercise. They had questions. Have any of my students ever refused to go? What would I do if everyone said no. Do I have any other tricky strategies? And a warning: you won’t fool us next time.

We’ll see, I laugh.

For the rest of the class, we talked about the philosophy of nonviolence and a few of its practitioners—Gandhi, King, Day, Muste, Merton, Amos, Chavez and a long list others. How many of them would have been car counters? I asked.

None, they answered, almost in unison.

You’re off to a fine start, I tell them Class is over. Go make some trouble.