Teaching Peace --A Classroom Manifesto
By Colman McCarthy
Can peace be taught? And then learned?
When I asked myself those questions 23 years ago, I phoned a few academics for their views. But listening to them orate, I responded like a journalist: disbelieving half of what they said and having grave doubts about the other half. I decided to do the kind of legwork and personal involvement that might supply a real-world answer. I went to the public school nearest my office at The Washington Post and offered my services as a volunteer teacher of peace.
The principal and faculty welcomed me, as did the students. That semester, 25 juniors and seniors enrolled in my course “Alternatives to Violence.” They were hungry to explore the unmapped landscape of nonviolence, pacifism and peaceful conflict resolution. Some students opened their minds immediately. They understood Gandhi: “Nonviolence is the weapon of the strong.” They believed Martin Luther King Jr. “The choice is not between violence and nonviolence but between nonviolence and nonexistence.”
Other students, who liked to call themselves realists, had doubts: Sure, nonviolence and pacifism are glorious theories and let’s all hug each other and burn incense after we read the Utne Reader in our hot tubs. But in the real world there are thugs across the street and dictators across the ocean. Try your Gandhi and King one-liners on them.
All I asked of the realists was to think about life’s two risks. Do you depend on violence or nonviolence to create peace? Not just peace in some vague out there among governments, but peace in our homes where physical beatings are the leading cause of injury among American women, or peace in the Third World where some 35,000 children die everyday from hunger or preventable diseases like malaria, or peace in those parts of the world where, by last count, 59 wars or conflicts are raging and where it is mostly the poor killing the poor.
I had one request from the students: no one in the class is allowed to ask questions. Instead, be braver and bolder: question the answers. What answers? The ones anyone gives when solutions to conflict are sought and the answer is violence. Question that answer.
The course went well, with plenty of debate and discussion. The text was “Solutions to Violence,” an anthology of essays I put together that included the writings of Gandhi, Dorothy Day, Gene Sharp, Tolstoy, Jeannette Rankin, Sargent Shriver, Helen Nearing, Barbara Deming, Joan Baez, Daniel Berrigan, Albert Einstein, Jane Addams, Michael True and a long list of others.
Three years later, I took the course to Georgetown University, American University, the University of Maryland and two more high schools. This year, I have courses at eight schools, including Georgetown Law. Since 1982, I’ve had more than 6,000 students in my courses. As a lifelong pacifist, I’ve had my hunches confirmed. Yes, peacemaking can be taught, the literature is large and growing. Yes, our schools should be offering academic courses on alternatives to violence. Yes, if we are going to teach the stories of peacebreakers—history’s warriors—balance it with the stories of peacemakers.
In 23 years I’ve seen the issue of violence in the schools surface as a major public policy debate. Solutions include student ID badges, metal detectors at the doors, police in the halls and national conferences on youth violence. We are awash with experts overflowing with opinions and strategies. As a classroom teacher, my experience-based belief is that unless we teach our children peace someone else will them violence. Yet we graduate students every year as peace illiterates. Would we graduate high school students without teaching them one course in math? Or one English course, or one science course. But graduating them with no course in the philosophy, history and practitioners of nonviolent conflict resolution is acceptable. Schools might as well be cheese factories where the young are processed like slabs of cheese: students at Velveeta High on the way to Cheddar U and Parmesan grad school.
Peace education is in its infancy. Earning little notice beyond their campuses, and sometimes even less inside those boundaries, a growing number of schools—at all levels—are either beginning or expanding programs in peace studies. In higher education, the Peace and Justice Studies Association, a national group based at the University of San Francisco, reports that as many as 300 undergraduate and graduate programs are in place. Majors, minors and concentrations are offered. In 1970, only college had a major: Manchester College in Indiana. The peace studies movement was energized last year when Joan Kroc, who died in October, left $50 million to programs at Notre Dame and the University of San Diego.
Peace teachers have no illusions that a few lessons on the methods of nonviolence and a reading list on the literature of peace will cause governments to start stockpiling plowshares, not swords, or that students will be converting to either practical pacifism—Denmark in the 1940s—or spiritual pacifism, as practiced by Dorothy Day. At the nation’s 78,000 grade schools and 31,000 high schools, where meddling politicians are ordering teachers to leave no child untested, peace courses are mostly seen as gourmet items on a shelf far from the standard fare of math, science, history and English.
Since the early 1980s, I’ve visited hundreds of schools to lecture and help organize peace studies programs. Although faculties have different tales about their efforts, they were linked by shared realities.
--Peace studies teachers had to defend themselves against administrative carpers who dismissed the program as intellectually soft, ideology driven and a ruse for reliving the heady 1960s.
--Peace teachers are artful scroungers, whether for office space or funding from already pinched sociology or political science departments. There is the faculty lounge debate on whether peace should have its own department or be an interdisciplinary subject, with a dean pledging to appoint a task force to ponder the issue and a report due in five years. By then, half the peace agitators will have retired.
--Students majoring or minoring in peace studies are forever being badgered by brow-furrowing parents: “You actually think you can get a job as a peacemaker?”
--Peace teachers do indeed like their hot tubs and incense, the better to reduce the stress of living under a war-mad U.S. government—the world’s most violent, King said in April 1967—that in the past 20 years has sent troops to kill or threaten to kill people in Lebanon, Libya, Grenada, Panama, Somalia, Haiti, Sudan, Yemen, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia and Iraq, and is the world’s largest arms peddler, and has a military budget that currently comes to more than $1 billion a day, or about $13,000 per second, or 49 percent of every federal discretionary tax dollar. Hannah Arendt wrote: “Violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is to a more violent world.”
Skeptics, along with their first cousins, dyspeptics, regularly confront pacifists with the question, where has nonviolence ever worked? Had the questioners paid only slight attention these past years, the answer wold be obvious: in plenty of places
On Feb. 26, 1986m a frightened Ferdinand Marcos, once a ruthless and U.S.-coddled ruler of the Philippines but now just another powerless rogue, fled to exile in Hawaii. As staged by nuns, students, merchants and workers, a three-year nonviolent revolt brought him down.
On Oct. 5, 1988 Chile’s despot, Gen. Augusto Pinochet was driver from office after five yearss of strikes boycotts and other forms of nonviolent resistance. A Chilean organizer who led the demand for free elections said: “We didn’t protest with guns. That gave us more power.” After years of dodging justice, Pinochet will soon face a trial in Santiago.
On Aug. 24, 1989 in Poland, the Soviet puppet regime of Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski fell. On that day it peacefully ceded power to a coalition government created by the Solidarity labor union that, for a decade, used nonviolent strategies to overthrow the communist dictator. The example of Poland’s nonviolence spread. The Soviet Union could have sent troops to Poland to stop the uprising, but Mikhail Gorbachev didn’t. He knew the end had come. It wasn’t speeches by himself or Reagan or the pope that ended the Cold War. It was the heroic deeds of Lech Walesa and the nonviolent Poles. They didn’t bring the Soviet Union to its knees, they brought it to its senses.
On May 10, 1994 former prisoner Nelson Mandela became the president of South Africa. It was not armed combat that ended white supremacy. It was the moral force of organized resistance that made it impossible for the racist government to control the justice-demanding population.
On April l, 2001 in Yugoslavia, Serbian police arrested Slobodan Milosevic for his crimes while in office. In the two years that a student-led protest rallied citizens to defy the dictator, not one resister was killed by the government. The tyrant is now on trial in The Hague getting due process.
On Nov. 23, 2003 the bloodless “revolution of the roses” toppled Georgian president Eduard Shevardnadze. Unlike the civil war that marked the power struggles in the 1990s, no deaths or injuries occurred when tens of thousands of Georgians took to the streets of Tblisi in the final surge to oust the government.
Twenty years ago, who would have thought this possible? Yet it happened. Ruthless regimes, backed by torture chambers and death squads, were driven from power by citizens who had no guns, tanks, bombs or armies. They had a superior arsenal: weapons of the will, the moral power of justice, the strength of the spirit, the toughness of patience.
Despite the factual record that organized nonviolence can work and peace through violence has failed, we resist. Theodore Roszak explains: “The usual pattern seems to be that people give nonviolence two weeks to solve their problem and then decide it has ‘failed.’ Then they go on with violence for the next hundred years and it seems never to ‘fail’ or be rejected.”
At the high school level, nudging the education establishment to offer courses in peacemaking won’t produce overnight conversions. In the early 1990s I needed six years to persuade the Montgomery County, Md, school board members, curriculum committees, principals and assorted desk barons to approve my text, “Solutions to Violence,” for use in the high schools, including Bethesda-Chevy Chase High where I had been, and still am, volunteering since 1987. Six years: and this was a supposedly enlightened, politically progressive county. At one meeting, a school board member, who presented himself as politically astute, said I would do well to come up with another name for the courses besides “peace studies.” The word “studies” was all right, but “peace” might be alarm some parents. I envisioned a newspaper headline: “Proposed Peace Course Threatens Community Stability.”.
I had a student at the University of Maryland a while back who wrote a 13 word paper that for both brevity and breadth—the rarest of combinations—has stayed with me: “Q. Why are we violent but not illiterate? A. Because we are taught to read.” This student—an imaginative lad named David Allan who went on to serve in Teach for America and is now a writer in New York City—didn’t know it but he shared the genius of both Albert Einstein and Mohandas Gandhi. Einstein wrote: “We must begin to inoculate our children against militarism by educating them in the spirit of pacifism…I would teach peace rather than war, love rather than hate.” Gandhi: “If we are to reach real peace in the world, we shall have to begin with the children. And if they will grow up in their natural innocence, we wont have to struggle, we won’t have to pass fruitless resolutions, but we shall go from love to love and peace to peace.”
Dreamy fantasy talk? Not in the classrooms where I’ve been. There the dreamy fantasy talkers are correctly identified as those who say one more bombing run and we’ll have peace, one more execution on death row and we’ll be safer, one more beating my kid and he’ll clean up his room.
From what I’ve seen, peace education is taking hold, despite the obstacles coming from school boards and assorted mahatmas. No matter. If the path to peace has no obstacles, it probably isn’t leading anywhere.
Colman McCarthy, a former columnist with The Washington Post, directs the Center for Teaching Peace in Washington DC. His recent book is “I’d Rather Teach Peace.” He is the editor of two peace anthologies: “Solutions to Violence” and “Strength Through Peace: the Ideas and People of Nonviolence.”