Learning About Peacemaking Is a Step Toward Ending Violence

“There is no way to peace. Peace is the way.”

--A. J. Muste

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Martin Luther King Jr. said that our choice is not between nonviolence and violence but between nonviolence and nonexistence. Statistically, we are told by the FBI, crime has steadily decreased for eight years, however many people also feel an increasingly random yet eerily personalized degree of susceptibility to being victimized. Some neighborhoods and schools, once thought inviolable, have been the target of bold perpetrators. And yet we have a choice: Be a part of the problem or a part of the solution.

But what’s the solution?

How do we fix our “gated community” mentality, mend our broken relationships, care for the castaways in society and work toward achieving solidarity, tolerance and peace? By making a commitment to educating the next generation of leaders, our young people, in the ways of nonviolence. If our human species is to survive, we must change the way we are doing things. Many of us feel helpless to fix our personal troubles, much less rid the world of nuclear weapons, abolish the death penalty, make a more egalitarian economy and protect global human rights. Violence originates in fear, which is rooted in misunderstanding, which comes from ignorance. And you fix ignorance through education.

Violence is like a dandelion-filled yard. We tug at the stems and step on the flowers--and rather than ridding the yard of this nuisance weed, we beget more. Yet when we pull up the flower by the roots, we have isolated the problem and fixed it. Nonviolence education is like that. Educating young people about how to deal with the problems they face daily, as well as how to organize to fix world issues, is the most effective means to solving the endemic violence that has infiltrated nearly every corner of society.

Beginning this fall at St. Bonaventure High School in Ventura, a structured, semester-long curriculum will allow students to read about the foundations, successes and actors in the nonviolence movement. Exposing a young student to Mohandas Gandhi and Henry David Thoreau can cause a permanent commitment to living a life of nonviolence. At the very least, it allows students to examine the institutions that govern their lives, like Selective Service registration, disparity of allocated funds for violent causes versus nonviolent ones or perhaps conscientious purchasing power and food consumption.

Nonviolence education stresses the availability of options in conflict, like mediation and creative dispute resolution. Making an educational commitment to studying peace in our violence-inundated world is the very least we owe future generations to whom we have left a legacy of destruction and might-makes-right domination.

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Societal trends seem to be working against the nonviolence cause. Our justice system is punitive rather than restorative, with little or no rehabilitation occurring in detention facilities despite the obvious need. New laws such as Proposition 21, the juvenile justice legislation passed in March, penalize communities and provide nothing for the welfare of victims or restoring the dignity of offenders.

We teach our children capitalistic consumerism yet tell them nothing about the lives of the workers who slave to assemble designer clothing. Nor do we tell them about the animals that suffered to create fashion or food. We do not inform them of the environmental impact of the trash they create. And by no means do we tell them that these situations are inextricably linked.

Yet there is hope. Learning about peacemaking is the first step. Students become aware that injustices exist; they absorb this information; finally, they are ready to take action. The beauty of a nonviolence curriculum is that it could be available to everyone: It works at a university as well as at maximum-security juvenile detention facilities. Because it speaks to students as co-proprietors of authority rather than as subordinates, they tend to internalize pacifist messages quickly and discreetly. It subtly permeates their thoughts and actions.

Students deserve a holistic curriculum. They deserve to know about Jeanette Rankin, the Montana Republican elected in 1916 as the first U.S. congresswoman; Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker Movement; and slain Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador. Institutionalizing nonviolence remains the goal. To clearly send that message, we must bring peace studies to our school boards and curriculum committees. We must maintain persistence and fidelity to the cause of peacemaker education.