Peace Education in Practice
By Colman McCarthy
In nearly 30 years of teaching high school, college and law school courses on the philosophy of pacifism and the methods of nonviolent conflict resolution, I use the opening moments of the semester for a spot quiz. A hundred dollar bill quiz. The lucre is yours, I tell the quickly engaged and somewhat dumbstruck students as they watch me pull out and wave the green: identify six historical figures. Who is Robert E. Lee? Most hands rise. Ulysses S. Grant? Another easy one. The same for Napolean. With only three to go, students know that pocketing the cash is now a definite possibility. Who is Emily Balch? No hands rise. Jeannette Rankin? More blanks. Dorothy Day? A wild guesser tries: she’s a movie star, the one in “Pillow Talk” with Rock Hudson.
Sorry, lad. That was Doris, not Dorothy, Day
It’s been safe money. No one’s ever won the $100. I can always count on American miseducation, and its zeal in assuring that the young are well-schooled on the militarists who break the peace and ill-schooled on those who make the peace. By the end of the semester, a bit of balance will have been restored. They’ll be up to speed--more cruising than high at first--with the thinking of Gandhi, Tolstoy, Robert Coles, Barbara Deming, Gene Sharp, Joan Baez, Daniel Berrigan, Alice Walker, David Delliner, Bayard Rustin, Sargent and Eunice Shriver, Scott and Helen Nearing. Wangari Maathi and a long list others.
I began teaching courses in what is generically known as peace studies out of curiosity:
are the ways of peacemaking teachable? And if so, why are so few schools--at any level--offering courses.
For answers, I went in 1982 to School Without Walls, a public high school near my office at The Washington Post to ask the principal if could volunteer to teach a course on alternatives to violence. Give it a try, she said. The two hour weekly seminar became a discussion based-based class, not mired with tests, exams or homework: neither Socrates nor Maria Montessori, history’s laurelled teachers and my North Stars on how to navigate schools, believed in such fake academic rigor.
My students were a bracing mix of the open-minded, wary and gracious. Two of my children had been students at Walls, bringing home stories about the school’s preference for experiential learning with internships, not theoretical learning from books.
The course went well. Teaching peace--reading, debating and discussing the literature and getting students to examine their own choices regarding violence and nonviolence--was as easy as breathing. Some children came from violent neighborhoods and were hungry to explore the unknown landscape of nonviolence. Others were from moneyed families who had ample funds for private schools but not a taste for the insularity.
We adopted a motto for the course: instead of asking questions, question the answers. What answers? The ones that say the answer is violence: kill enough people, drop enough bombs, jail enough dissenters, torture enough prisoners, keep fighting fire with fire--and never with water--and we’ll have peace forever.
Enjoying it immensely, I added more schools: a daily 7:25 am class at Bethesda-Chevy High School in suburban Washington and a weekly 2 hour class at Wilson High in the District of Columbia. By the mid-1980’s I had weekly classes at Georgetown University Law Center, American University, the University of Maryland and the Washington Center for Internships. Since 1982, I’ve had more than 7,000 students in my classes.
Nationally, the peace education movement is small but growing. In 1970 only Manchester College, a Church of the Brethren school in Indiana, had a peace studies degree. Currently, according to the Peace and Justice Studies Association based at Arizona’s Prescott College, some 450 undergraduate, masters and doctoral programs and concentrations are offered in 38 states and 40 countries. The U.S. schools include American University, Berkeley, Guilford, Earlham, Colgate, Goshen and the University of Colorado. Costa Rica has the University of Peace. Before her death in 2003, Joan Kroc gave $75 million to the University of San Diego and $62 million to the University of Notre Dame for peace studies programs. The Rotary Foundation funds 70 masters degree fellowships annually in peace and conflict studies.
Although the message is getting out that unless we teach our children peace someone else will teach them violence, no one should be deluded. The day is distant when peace education is on the same academic footing as math and science. Most seniors in my high school classes have had 12 years since first grade in those subjects, with only one peace course--mine--tucked in as an elective. Would we ever graduate them with only one math or one science course in 12 years? Yet the young are instructed by assorted politicians, shamans and visionaries that nothing is more important than peace. Yes, children, let’s give peace a chance--but not a place in the curriculum.
Whether in high school, college or law school classes, my students usually paired into two groups. One would bond intellectually, and often quickly, with Gandhi’s belief that “nonviolence is the weapon of the strong” and agree with Hannah Arendt that “violence, like all action, changes the world but the most probably change is to a more violent world.” Many have endured violence in their own lives. On leaving class a few semesters ago, after we had discussed Gandhi’s views on war and peace, a student pulled me aside to say she enjoyed learning about that but what about the war in her own life: the combat zone of her home. She described years of witnessing her father and mother battle each other verbally, emotionally and sometimes physically. How do I end that war? she asked.
Valid question. Perhaps if we’d had her parents in schools where nonviolent conflict resolution skills were systematically taught, the homefront fights might not have scarred their marriage. Leaving school as peace illiterates, it was too late: shaping a peaceful child is easier than reshaping a violent adult. Is it grandiose to think that if peace courses were in the nation’s schools that domestic violence--the leading cause of injury to women--would decrease?
I’ve wondered, too, about members of Congress, Left or Right, who helped hike military spending more than 60 percent during the Bush years. What if all of them--a few, even--had studied peace in college? Would Barbara Lee from Oakland have been the only member of Congress--one out of 535--to vote against the Bush war plans on 9/14/01? Would they remember Jeannette Ranken’s votes against both World War I and II and her belief that you can no more win a war than win an earthquake.
The other group came to class encrusted with doubts, eyeing me as a ‘60s Lefty who had put one too many daisies into soldiers’ gun barrels and knocked on one too many doors in New Hampshire for Clean Gene. Nonviolence and pacifism are noble theories, they instructed me, but in the real world we have to deal with, and destroy, international despots across the ocean and street thugs across town. So let’s keep our bomb bays opened, and our fists cocked. I respected the students’ skepticism, while asking them to consider that if violence were truly effective we would have had peace eons ago. And to remember that in the past quarter century at least five brutal regimes--Philippines, Chile, Poland, Yugoslavia and Georgia--were overthrown by people who had no bombs or bullets but, more powerful, had strategies of nonviolence that worked. Add to the list Egypt and Tunisia. During the same years, American presidents and congresses ordered up violent force in Grenada, Panama, Haiti, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, Pakistan, Afghanistan,Iraq and now Libya. Except for mounds of corpses, profits to military contractors and career boosts for generals and war correspomdents, for what?
Peace teachers have no illusions that exposing students to the literature of peace
and the methods of nonviolence will cause governments to stockpile plowshares, not swords, or that across the Hudson River from the West Point Military Academy will be the East Point Peace Academy. Nor do they see the fog clearing when it comes to persuading the academic mahatmas on school boards that the study of peace should be given as primary a place in the curriculum as any other essential subject. In elementary and secondary schools this is the era of No Child Left Untested--the answer to the latest report that all those Japanese and Chinese whizzes are years ahead of America’s slackers.
Muscling one course into one school takes extraordinary flexing. A while back I was invited by a school board to speak about peace education. After 20 minutes I thought I was getting through. My goal was to move it to sanction one peace class in each of the county’s 22 high schools. One course. One period a day. An elective for seniors. Nothing grand.
I was already a volunteer peace teacher in one of the county’s high schools, so I wasn’t breezing in as a theorist with a lofty idea but let someone else do the work. At the end of my pitch, a board member had a problem. Peace studies, he pondered. Is there another phrase? The word studies was okay, but peace? It might raise concerns in the community. I envisioned a newspaper headline: “Peace Studies Proposal Threatens Stability In the County” with a sub-head, “School Board Nixes Far Out Proposal.” And this was in a bluer than blue county.
Unable to rally the board, I tried the school system’s curriculum office. It was an end run, and there’s always an end to run around if you look hard enough. I had edited a textbook, “Solutions to Violence,” a 16 chapter collection of 90 essays that ranged from Gene Sharp’s “The Technique of Nonviolent Action” to Joan Baez’s “What Would You Do If?” After near-endless meetings with assorted bureaucrats, papercrats and educrats, I realized that public schools are government schools. Teachers are government workers. Obedience prevails. Innovation is suspect. It took six years to get “Solutions to Violence” approved. I’d already been using it in my own course all that time, slipping it in like contraband and starting off the semester with a discussion of Thoreau’s “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience.” Dutiful and disobedient me.
Private schools, moated to keep the hordes from storming in, have their own ways of caution about peace education. Excessive amounts of Advance Placement courses, matched by equally excessive amounts of homework in math and science are the air currents expected to waft students into top colleges. How can a mere peace course oxygenate an already rarefied air? Neither a theoretical nor experiential knowledge of nonviolence is seen as a help in acing the SATs. Kaplan prep courses are about outfoxing tests, not for developing reflectiveness. Doubtlessly, private schools can graduate brainy students. But are they brainy and peace educated? I recall speaking at a New England prep school and being told by the headmaster that he and his faculty take peace education seriously: once a year Peace Day is scheduled in. Wonderful, I said: Is there also Algebra Day once a year. A yearly Physics Day?
I’ve taught in several private high schools in the Washington area, including Georgetown Day, Landon and Stone Ridge. The course attracted students who had unshackled themselves from the academic pressures by realizing that Walker Percy had it right: you can make all A’s in school and go on to flunk life. They grasped that often enough private schools, however committed to excellence the faculties may be, process students as if they are hunks of cheese enrolled in Velveeta Prep on the way to Mozzarella U and Parmesan grad school.
A crucial part of peace education is exposing students to the personal joys of service, given them a chance to become, in Martin Luther King, Jr’s, words “other- centered, not self-centered.” I’ve taken my high school, college and law school students into prisons, death row cell blocks, the literacy centers and soup kitchens--sometimes to be of real service, other times to be around and learn from people who are broke and broken.
Serving food to the hungry or tutoring inmates is useful but it can remain mere dabbling in charity without coming back to the classroom to make the connections between poverty and public policy. Which politicians obeying which lobbies sanction increasing military spending while decreasing budgets for low income housing? Which policies allow prisons to be packed with the mentally ill or drug addicted who need treatment not punishment. Which congressional committees find it acceptable for the Pentagon to be given $2.5 billion a day, while everyday in the Third World more than 35,000 people die of hunger or preventable diseases? What policies create tax shelters for the rich but not homeless shelters for the poor?
I’ve been accused of teaching a one-sided course, that I don’t expose students to the other side. It’s true, except my course is the other side, the one that students aren’t getting in conventional history or political science courses that present violent solutions as rational and necessary.
In 1985 my wife and I founded The Center for Teaching Peace. Supported by foundation grants and membership, our work is assisting schools at all levels either to begin or expand academic programs in peace education. In my own travels, I’ve seen progress. At one east coast high school that uses “Solutions to Violence,” as well as a companion anthology “Strength Through Peace,” all juniors take a peace studies course. This was once a Catholic military school. I spoke at the Cate School near Santa Barbara last year and found a teacher eager to create a peace studies course. Earlier it was Bishop Dunne High School in Dallas.
I heard recently from a teacher at Niles West High School, Skokie, Illinois: “I’m writing to let you know that our district, somewhat miraculously, approved a peace studies course….I ordered your two collections of peace essays years ago, and you wrote back an encouraging letter. It took a long time to get a course started here, with many institutional hoops to go 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.”
Over the years, I’ve visited hundreds of schools to lecture on the need for peace education. I can report that large numbers of students, whether seeking alternatives to violence in their own lives or sickened by governments that rely on the gun, have embraced the advice offered to the young a century ago by Prince Peter Kropotkin: “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.”
Is there a doubt that a peaceful world is what the young want and that so far violence solutions have disastrously failed?
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Colman McCarthy, a former Washington Post columnist, directs the Center for Teaching Peace in Washington D.C.