Peace Education

• Against the Testing Culture
  A rebuttal of test-driven education and its failure to measure what matters most — whether students are learning to think, or merely to perform.
  747 words · 2 min read
• Bringing Peace Studies to Missouri
  How a growing number of schools are answering the question that governments won't: if everyone claims to want peace, shouldn't we be teaching it?
  663 words · 2 min read
• Can Peace be Taught?
  McCarthy's case for peace education, built not from academic theory but from twenty years of walking into classrooms and volunteering to teach what no one else would.
  1,332 words · 5 min read
• Five Myths About Pacifism
  After 8,000 students and decades in the classroom, McCarthy dismantles the myths about pacifism that arrive with every new semester — starting with the idea that it means doing nothing.
  1,029 words · 4 min read
• From Columnist to Teacher of Peace (WaPo years reflection)
  A reflection on how nearly thirty years of interviewing Nobel laureates and peacemakers at the Post led McCarthy out of journalism and into the classroom.
  324 words · 1 min read
• Getting a Peace Studies Course Approved -- A Case Study
  The story of one teacher's years-long effort to get a single peace studies course into a single school — a case study in bureaucratic persistence.
  743 words · 2 min read
• In Defense of Wilson High
  McCarthy defends his school from a columnist's drive-by critique, drawing on years of teaching there to set the record straight.
  729 words · 2 min read
• Left at the Center - Essays on Teaching Peace
  In twenty-five years of teaching nonviolence, McCarthy finds the purest learning happens outside the classroom — on death row, in birthing centers, in homeless shelters.
  1,827 words · 7 min read
• Left at the Center -- Experiential Learning and Peace Education
  Why some of the purest learning happens outside the classroom — on death row, in homeless shelters, at peace rallies — not inside it.
  248 words · 1 min read
• Lessons from the Front Lines of Peace Education
  A report from the front lines of getting peace studies into America’s 31,000 high schools — where the word ‘peace’ itself can cause concern in the community.
  1,427 words · 5 min read
• Maria Montessori and the Case Against Homework
  Looking back a hundred years to Maria Montessori's experiment in a Roman ghetto for ideas the modern testing culture has buried.
  600 words · 2 min read
• Peace Education in Practice
  The hundred-dollar-bill quiz: McCarthy's opening gambit for every new class, testing whether students can name peacemakers as easily as generals.
  2,518 words · 10 min read
• Peace Studies (making the case)
  The case for peace studies at Washington's major universities, where courses in nonviolence are drawing students in larger numbers than anyone expected.
  1,268 words · 5 min read
• Peace Studies Comes to America’s Universities
  Peace studies arriving at Washington’s four major universities — still earning little public attention, but answering a question no one else will ask.
  536 words · 2 min read
• Peace Studies at Catholic Colleges -- A Fragile Foothold
  A tour of Catholic colleges where peace and justice programs are hanging on — thriving in some places, barely surviving in others.
  3,641 words · 14 min read
• Private Schools and the Limits of Elite Education
  What the Obamas' choice of Sidwell Friends reveals about the gap between elite private schools and the public schools five blocks away.
  1,861 words · 7 min read
• Public Schools, Private Schools, and Real Education
  A year after the Sidwell decision, McCarthy asks whether the best education is found in well-kempt private schools or underfunded public ones where real life intrudes.
  1,013 words · 4 min read
• Public vs. Private Schools -- Lessons Beyond Sidwell
  The tensions between private school privilege and public school grit, with Sidwell Friends and School Without Walls as the two poles.
  806 words · 3 min read
• Students on Hunger Strike --Georgetown’s Living Wage Campaign
  Georgetown students prove that well-organized nonviolent power works, staging a hunger strike that wins janitors and food workers a living wage.
  717 words · 2 min read
• Teaching Peace
  The essay that distills it all: twenty-two years of teaching peace, the classroom as laboratory, and the stubborn belief that nonviolence can be learned.
  653 words · 2 min read
• Teaching Peace --A Classroom Manifesto
  McCarthy's manifesto for teaching peace — born from disbelieving the experts and deciding to find out for himself at the nearest public school.
  2,090 words · 8 min read
• Teaching Peace in a Violent Culture
  From Nobel laureates to classroom volunteers, a life spent collecting evidence that peace education works — and that the culture badly needs it.
  5,198 words · 20 min read
• Teaching Peace in a Violent Culture (Hope Magazine Interview)
  A candid interview on thirty years of peace journalism, the decision to teach, and why he tells students to become disturbers of the peace.
  6,662 words · 26 min read
• Teaching Peace in a Violent World (California Lecture)
  A lecture delivered at the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation distilling decades of journalism and teaching into a single case for why peace must be taught as rigorously as war.
  5,083 words · 20 min read
• Teaching in the Shadow of Teen Depression
  The hardest part of teaching: losing students to suicide, and the helpless question of whether a teacher could have read the signals differently.
  660 words · 2 min read
• The Real Jesuit Achievement --Middle Schools that Transform Boys
  The Jesuits' brightest achievement may not be their famous high schools and universities but their sixteen middle schools, where the hardest work of education happens earliest.
  775 words · 3 min read
• The Tyranny of “Like” -- Teaching Language and Clarity
  A plea, born of long suffering, against the verbal tic that has reduced student speech to babble — and what it costs them in clarity and thought.
  640 words · 2 min read
• Thirty Years of Teaching Peace
  A retrospective on nearly thirty years in the classroom — 7,000 students, the $100 bill quiz no one has ever won, and the question that won’t go away: if everyone wants peace, why isn’t it in the curriculum?
  1,346 words · 5 min read
• Why High Schools Resist Peace Studies
  Colleges have made room for peace studies; high schools, where the need is arguably greatest, have not — and here is why.
  1,457 words · 5 min read
• Why I Don’t Give Tests
  McCarthy’s refusal to test students, on the grounds that tests measure the fear of failure, not the capacity to think.
  738 words · 2 min read
• Why Schools Should Teach Peace
  Thirty years in, the challenge remains: where to begin teaching nonviolence in a culture that treats peace as a soft subject.
  2,727 words · 10 min read
• “No, I’d Rather Teach Peace” -- The Origin Story
  The story of how a Washington Post columnist walked into a D.C. public school in 1982 to talk about writing — and never left.
  6,291 words · 25 min read