Thirty Years of Teaching Peace
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 with the thinking of Gandhi, Tolstoy, Robert Coles, Barbara Deming, Gene Sharp, Joan Baez, Daniel Berrigan, Alice Walker, David Dellinger, Bayard Rustin, Sargent and Eunice Shriver, Scott and Helen Nearing, Wangari Maathai and a long list of 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 I 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 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.
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 Chase 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.
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. Shaping a peaceful child is easier than reshaping a violent adult.
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. 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.
A crucial part of peace education is exposing students to the personal joys of service, giving 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?
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.
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 violent solutions have disastrously failed?