Got Peace?
Prof. McCarthy
Issues in Peace Studies
25 April 2003
“We never own anything until we give it away. That’s the heart of peace.”
-Sargent Shriver
“How do you teach peace? You can teach English, you can teach history, you can teach math, but you can’t teach peace.” When I looked at the course booklet over the summer, trying to decide which classes I would choose for my first semester of college, I immediately glanced past the small list of classes that were titled under the subject of “Justice and Peaces Studies.” How are peace and justice class subjects?
When I came to Georgetown, I was immediately and unknowingly introduced to the subject. As a participant of a freshmen orientation to community service, I was meeting both students and speakers who recognized peace as an academic subject. Though Georgetown University does not provide peace studies with a department, it does support it through a “program” that allows students to either minor or receive a certificate in the field. The program has no office though and thus has no physical or visual representation—it is just taught by a collection of teachers that cover an array of departments. This year though a major in the field peace studies was allowed, that is, when a student approached her or his dean early as an “Interdisciplinary Studies” major, taking the initiative to custom-design the new major. Clearly, Georgetown, in a sense, has recently grasped the notion of peace education as well.
After taking an introductory-level course on peace, I realized that peace is indeed a solid subject—a complex and boundless one. Peace studies pursues every aspect of life because, in order to exist, it must pervade every aspect of life. The concept of peace, a combination of harmony, security, freedom and love, is difficult to define and also difficult to find because it rarely exists in its purest form. In order to study and examine peace, one must study its current presence as well as its antitheses which often thwart it. In that sense, “peace education is concerned with [peace as well as with] peaceless situations.” The formation of peace studies are often a result of a prevalence of violence, hate, and oppression. In order to achieve peace, the peaceless parts of society must be addressed.
As a “young” field (even though theories of peace have existed since the ancients), peace education lacks a standard structure. If one looks at other subjects in the public education system, each subject has an established path—the generic order (first algebra, then calculus) and the generic material (Golding’s Lord of the Flies and Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby). What is the typical curriculum of peace? The readings of Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.? That’s a start. But it is clear that peace education still has a lot of growing to do.
As a rising senior, I am now considering my post-graduation options. Currently, I hope to work for a small organization that seeks the promotion of social justice, service, and peace—some sort of nongovernmental organization or nonprofit one. Then, I would hope to return to school to receive a master’s degree in education, (or peace studies or government studies, etc.) and finally receive the certification to be a high school teacher.
I want to teach peace. I was once shy about this ambition but am now more open about it. I am not ashamed to say that I want to be a peace teacher—I just grow tired of answering the question that I was just asking myself a couple of years back: “how do you teach peace?” In a sense, I have to question both who I was and who I am. If I choose to assess society, I must be sure to assess myself. “The man who has the courage to examine and to judge himself makes progress in kindness. It is a hard fight for all of us to become truly peaceable.” Violence permeates each second—verbally, visually, and structurally—to the point where peace seems permanently unattainable.
To be peaceful is to reject such common attitudes and practices that encourage violence—to be peaceful is almost the act of trying to grow young, to de-stigmatize oneself from the burdens, fears, and cynicisms that form with time. As one ages, one hardens and conforms into her beliefs and political and religious identities. A person grows to understand and accept the norms of society. When I was nine, I felt comfortable telling strangers that I did not believe in God. Today though, I am careful to only share that information with those that I trust—now that I’m older, I am more aware to the rules, sensitivities and complications of life. Peace requires an ability to examine norms first as being conditions of society and secondly as being potentially detrimental to society despite their familiarity.
Peace education is difficult to accept because peace in itself is difficult to accept. Though it is clearly an attractive ideal, if people were actually presented with peace and the arduous task of maintaining it, they may not have such an affinity towards it. Peace may not be so readily preferred or quoted once people understand that, in order to exist, it must actively pursued and preserved. In order to be more peaceful, one must fight to question and mistrust what he instinctively trusts, letting go of accepted customs and thoughts—the grudges, the stereotypes, the perceptions of the past and present state of society and the accepted ways of handling and responding to conflict. One must fundamentally reverse her mentality in order to let peace, not violence, permeate. One must consistently challenge the norm. For example, “when school shootings occur, and the inevitable call goes out “to do something,” dollars are [typically] spent on metal detectors, hallway police or ID badges for the kids—not [on] textbooks on nonviolence or [on] salaries for potential peace studies teachers” The textbooks. The peace teachers’ salaries. They are not norms—yet they could easily be the more effective and beneficial solutions to the generic ones. To find these alternative, productive, and nonviolent solutions is an act of peace.
Peace education is also less typical because it is fundamentally linked to service. Peace studies is a unique subject because it requires both study and practice. Peace cannot be strictly examined and dissected; the act of studying is an indirect act of actualizing it. Since the study of peace is a way of reexamining the world through alternative perspectives, the pursuit and act of peace is already taking place.
Currently I am facing a difficulty in explaining my desire to serve. Not that I doubt my motivation to serve but that I fail to articulate it. I have such faith in the idea of service and the hope of achieving social justice that I never let myself stop and question my motivation.
In my experiences with service, especially serving as a college student and serving with other college students, I have accepted that social change, justice and equalities are indeed the long-term goals of service but I also fully recognize, in a cynical fashion, that injustices will exist today and tomorrow—at least in my lifetime. So I know that I simply do not serve in hopes of creating a “perfect world” because I do not believe one could develop so rapidly. And I know that I am not religiously-motivated to serve because I cannot even express myself comfortably through religious vocabulary.
I recognize that I often have selfish reasons for serving—I want to explore a new part of DC, I want to talk to women who have had certain experiences that would educate and inspire me, I am bored, or I just want to do an activity with some friends. But these reasons, though influences, are not my sole reasons for serving.
In initially questioning my motivation, I became annoyed and frustrated that I blindly trusted service. In trying to comprehend my incentive, I realized that service is necessary no matter how many or how few injustices prevail. Service, plain and simple, for me, is a need to be humanly social, a need to work with others—receiving and giving—a need to communicate and interact, a need to truly actualize the concept of community: ultimately, a need to be peaceful.
Service is not a means to social justice that will eventually fade as the presence of social justice strengthens. Service is an eternal, infinite act of being peaceful—of being human and of interacting, sharing, and loving. In understanding this, I understand my motivation. As a human, I naturally crave peace. Though my understanding of peace as an academic concept was both late and slow, I have noticed an augmentation in the field already—via faculty and my fellow students. Peace education is growing—and that only means one thing: peace is growing.