Why High Schools Resist Peace Studies
By Colman McCarthy
Those who value peace education, and see schools as prime sites for the systematic study of pacifism and nonviolence, have found colleges and universities to be the most receptive to course proposals and the funding of degree programs. Though still small and often kept to the academic margins compared with a school’s business or science programs, peace studies does have a place in higher education that it didn’t 20 years ago.
It isn’t that way in the nation’s 31,000 public or independent high schools. Since 1982, when I began volunteering at a Washington DC public high school, and a few years later took the course to two more high schools, I have seen from the inside the difficulties of cracking secondary education with peace courses. In addition, after more than two decades of contacts with teachers around the country, either through correspondence or my speaking at high school student assemblies, I have learned the truth of the old saying: the trouble with a good idea is that it soon degenerates into hard work.
The hardness begins with the negative perceptions about peace courses, whether projected by school boards, principals, parents, students or politicians posing as school reformers.
Peace studies can be seen as subversive. Fifteen years ago at a meeting of school board members in Montgomery County, Md., outside of Washington D.C., I was invited to pitch the idea of peace studies. I thought I was making progress. Board members listened politely and asked relevant questions. My goal was to move the board to get one peace studies course in each of the county’s 22 high schools: just one course, for just one period a day and just an elective only for seniors. Nothing grandiose.
I was already a volunteer peace teacher at one of the county’s high schools, so I wasn’t coming in as a theorist with a lofty idea but let someone else do the work. At the end of my talk, a board member had a problem. Peace studies, he said. Is there another phrase? The word studies was okay, but peace? It might cause concern in the community. I envisioned a newspaper headline: Peace Studies Threatens Stability in the County, with a sub-head: School Board Tables Alarming Proposal. And this was in an allegedly liberal bluer than blue county.
Unable to rally the school board, I tried again with the school system’s curriculum office. I had edited a textbook: “Solutions to Violence,” a16 chapter anthology of 90 essays that included Gandhi, Dorothy Day, Gene Sharp, Tolstoy, Barbara Deming, Joan Baez, Dan Berrigan and others. After some half-dozen meetings with assorted desk barons, as well as conferences with social studies teachers at several high schools, I began to realize that public schools are government schools. Teachers are government workers. Caution prevails. It took six years to get the book approved: any social studies teacher in the county’s 22 high schools could use it. I’d already been using it myself for ten years in one of those schools, slipping it in like contraband.
If peace studies is not subversive, then, assuredly, it is a gourmet item. In the supermarket of ideas that is the American high school, the shelves are stacked with required fare: four years of English, four of math, three of science, three of history, four of this, three of that. Plus the AP courses on which—so it is thought by gullible parents and gulled students—everything rides, including, for sure, getting into an Ivy League or Little Ivy school. Up against the pressure of requirements or the fear of not having enough AP credits, peace studies is seen as a luxury, academic caviar in the gourmet aisle. Students who sign up for peace courses must often defend themselves against the criticism of their friends, or even parents, for being a tad too idealistic for this world torn by terrorism, crime and violence. More than one of my high school students has heard Mom or Dad sighingly ask, “You actually think you’ll get a job someday as a peacemaker?”
If students are pressured, so are teachers. In this time of Leave No Child Untested, and Leave No Teacher Unwatched, schools are measured less by their abilities to rouse students to the joys of learning than by the number of their students who ace exams because they were well drilled. Teachers who refuse to be drillers, or be cowed by the testing mania, and who think that education ought to be about freeing minds, not controlling them, will be seen as deviants from the established way. High school teachers, especially in the public schools, are among the nation’s most demoralized workers. Some teachers of creative bent tell me that they occasionally slip an essay on nonviolence into their English or Sociology courses, while edgily fearing that the Thought Police might catch wind.
In many high schools, another kind of fear persists—of violence itself. Reacting to the growing problem of gunfire in and around Washington high schools, the mayor recently ordered the police department to oversee security. At one of my schools, six police officers wearing bullet-proof vests and carrying guns are in the halls. Students enter through metal detectors, monitored by security guards. I may be at the school to teach peace but the cops are there to keep the peace. A course on nonviolence is fine, but let’s get real: which would more assure parents that their children are safe in school, cops patrolling the building or a peace teacher in one classroom?
The closest some schools get to peace education is through peer mediation programs, often offered as an after school activity. The message to students is obvious: school administrators aren’t taking the subject seriously, otherwise algebra or physics would also be after school activities.
One reason I’ve been able to teach peace courses is that I didn’t ask to be paid. I’m no strain on the budget. The high school where I began teaching in 1982 is one of the poorest in America: it has no cafeteria, no auditorium, no gym, no athletic fields and no lockers. The DC school system itself needs an estimated $1 billion for building renovations and repairs. Only the nation’s wealthiest school districts have the money to begin peace studies courses, but if it’s a choice between hiring peace teachers or expanding the computer lab, or building a new wing, or resodding the football field, or funding class trips to Europe, which wins?
In high schools, peace education is in its infancy. Progress, however halting, can be found. At one east coast Catholic high school I’ve worked with, all juniors are required to take a peace course. And this was once a Catholic military school. In Philadelphia, a peace school—publicly funded-- opened its doors this Fall. “In a city in which too many of our young people and families feel threatened by violence, it’s time to study and practice peace,” Shelly Yanoff of the Philadelphia Citizens for Children and Youth told the Philadelphia Inquirer. At Christo Rey, a Jesuit high school in Chicago, one of my Georgetown University students won approval to devise a peace course. One of my former Georgetown law school students resigned from the DC Bar three years ago to become a peace teacher at a public high school in Washington. In just the past week, I heard from two veteran teachers in Georgia and California who are pushing ahead to get peace courses in place.
The California teacher is at Berkeley High near Oakland. I did a double take. It’s only now that they’re studying peace at Berkeley, enclave of all things daring, dashing, and dazzling? It reminded me of Mark Twain’s line, “get a reputation for rising early and you can sleep til noon.”
I can report that high school students are hungry to study alternatives to violence, whether in their personal lives where many were raised in homes wracked by emotional, verbal or physical violence, or their political lives where only a few parties—the Greens, Libertarians—counter the militarism of Democrats and Republicans. High school years can be a time when bondings with ideals and ideas are shaped. Not to offer the study of peace in school is to assure the likelihood that peace won’t be practiced when schooling is over. It’s to assure that unless we teach our children peace, someone else will teach them violence. It’s to assure that a future educational historian, looking back on these times when getting peace studies into our high schools might have happened on a large scale, will ask: why didn’t they try harder?
Colman McCarthy, a former Washington Post columnist, directs the Center for Teaching Peace in Washington DC. He is currently teaching at four universities and three high schools.