Can peace be taught—and learned?

Humanist, May-June, 2005 by Colman McCarthy

When I asked myself twenty-three years ago if peace could be taught and learned, I queried a few academics on their views. But after 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 I needed to research this for myself to find a valid answer. I began by visiting the public high school nearest my Washington Post office and volunteered my services as a teacher of peace.

The principal and faculty welcomed me, as did the students. That semester, twenty-five 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 the teaching of Mohandas Gandhi: "Nonviolence is the weapon of the strong." They believed Martin Luther King Jr. when he said, "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, they said, 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, they argued.

All I asked of the realists was to think about life's two risks: do you depend on violence or nonviolence to achieve 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 developing world, where presently some 35,000 children die daily from hunger or such preventable diseases as malaria; or peace in those parts of the world where, by last count, fifty-nine wars or conflicts rage and where it is mostly the poor killing the poor.

I had one request for the students: no one in the class be allowed to ask questions. Instead, they were prompted to be braver and bolder by questioning the answers. What answers? The simplistic ones commonly given as solutions to conflict in which the answer is violence. I urged them to 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, Leo 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 my course to Georgetown University, American University, the University of Maryland, and two more high schools. In 2005 I have courses at eight schools--including Georgetown Law. Since 1982 I've had more than six thousand 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--we must balance it with the stories of peacemakers.

Over the last twenty-three years I've seen the issue of violence in the schools surface as a major public policy debate. Solutions proffered include student ID badges, metal detectors at the doors, police in the hallways, and national conferences on youth violence. We are bombarded by endless opinions and strategies of the experts. As a classroom teacher, my experience-based belief is that, unless we teach our children peace, someone else will teach 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 English or science? But graduating them with no course in the philosophy, history, and practices of nonviolent conflict resolution is currently acceptable.

Peace education is in its infancy. It earns little notice beyond its campuses, and sometimes even less within those boundaries, although 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 three hundred undergraduate and graduate programs are in place. Majors, minors, and concentrations are offered. In 1970 only one college offered a major in peace education: Manchester College in Indiana. But the peace studies movement was energized in October 2004 when philanthropist Joan Kroc died and left $50 million to peace programs at Notre Dame and the University of San Diego.

Peace educators 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 (as founded in Denmark in the 1940s) or spiritual pacifism (as practiced by Dorothy Day). At the 78,000 grade schools and 31,000 high schools in the United States, 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.