Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: education

  • Teaching Youth To Start Worrying About The Bomb

    HIROSHIMA, Japan — After 18 years of almost daily lectures about surviving the atomic bomb dropped here on Aug. 6, 1945, Setsuko Iwamoto’s stories to classrooms full of students have a finely limned quality about them, as smooth as pebbles in a creek.

    There is no straining for melodrama as the 71-year-old woman recounts how her skin seemed to melt and pour off her arms after the flash, or how whatever scraps of cloth that could be found were used by people to protect themselves from the black rain that fell afterward.

    Stories of survival do not get much more compelling. But Ms. Iwamoto worries now, with Japan inching toward rearmament, that the spirit of Hiroshima and the moral power of her story are fading.

    Each year, she said, the stares of the students she faces from the podium grow blanker, just as their questions about the atomic bombing grow more stilted, appearing rehearsed rather than heartfelt.

    “Just a few years ago, most schoolteachers had direct memories of the war,” said Ms. Iwamoto, who said she was found to have cancer last year but appeared hale. “That’s not the case at all anymore, though, and I wonder once this kind of lecture ends, how effectively the experience of war is taught.

    “In my day we had trouble just surviving every day, whereas these days everyone in Japan is comfortable,” Ms. Iwamoto added. “Children learn about war through manga [comic books] and think it is kind of cool. They have no particular sensation of Japan’s defeat.”

    The profound shock of the Hiroshima bombing, and that of Nagasaki three days later, is widely credited not only with ending World War II, but with creating a strong emotional underpinning to Japan’s official creed of nonviolence, consecrated in an American-drafted Constitution that faces increasingly strident calls for revision.

    Fears about Japan becoming increasingly blasé about remembering the atomic bombings, though, are not limited to the survivors, or hibakusha, as they are known here.

    Hiroshima’s entire image and economy are linked to the horrendous final days of World War II, and city officials say visits by Japanese travelers are locked in a serious, long-term decline, broken only by a modest spike since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States.

    Commissions have been formed to reverse the trend. A museum on the grounds of the Peace Park, near ground zero, has been expanded and modernized. In the hope of popularizing visits here, even a manga has been created — to celebrate the memory of Sadako Sasaki, a 12-year-old who died of blood cancer years after the bombing.

    “We are faced with the challenge of conveying this experience to the next generations,” said Noriyuki Masuda, associate director of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Association. “At some point we realized that what we had was a crisis involving young people’s consciousness. We have been facing a change in attitudes and a decline of interest in Japan as a nation.”

    When Ms. Iwamoto completed her one-hour presentation to a lecture hall full of sixth graders who had come to Hiroshima on a field trip, five minutes were left for what was billed as a question and answer session.

    In lieu of a question, a young girl who appeared to have been chosen for her excellence in study walked nervously to the microphone and read a brief speech in the name of her class. “Why must there be war?” she said flatly, ending her comments with a wish for the lecturer’s good health.

    Asked if visits at a slightly older age might favor deeper thought, not to mention real questions, the girl’s teacher, Keiko Tokunaga, demurred. “This is the age when children are just beginning to think about the world,” she said, “and I think that it is the best time to introduce ideas like this. But this is just a start.”

    Out on the grand plaza of the Peace Park, where the famous atomic bomb dome sits, just a stone’s throw across the Motoyasu River, one has trouble imagining that visits to the Hiroshima memorial grounds are in decline.

    Over the course of a fine spring day, one group after another of uniformed students troops from the museum to the dome, typically laying wreaths and garlands of origami cranes by a statue of Miss Sasaki, the renowned 12-year-old bomb victim.

    Foreign visitors, whose numbers have increased as those of Japanese have declined, are also constantly in evidence. This day, a group of volunteer greeters were excitedly awaiting the arrival of a group from Senegal, including the country’s ambassador.

    At the approach of an American journalist, a group of ninth graders from Tokyo was unfailingly polite, and even excited to be answering questions about their trip here. None had discussed the bombing, or Japan’s long-fixed identity as a nation of peace, with their parents before coming.

    Nor did they have many ideas of how the war began or why it ended amid mushroom clouds and hundreds of thousands of instant casualties. “This was kind of an experiment, because it was the first atomic bombing,” said Eiichiro Hiraka, a 14-year-old with a dream of becoming a professional baseball player. “Hiroshima was the perfect size for that.”

    A classmate, Kaoru Iwasaki, said she had studied World War II the year before but did not remember much. “I’m sorry, but I can’t tell you why the war started,” she said. Asked the same question, her friend Chisato Kajitani declared that she was not very interested in the subject. “I’ve never really thought about that question before,” she said.

  • The Politics of Education Reform

    President Bush recently announced that he wants to expand federal funding for school services to help low-income children. Yet the $1 billion of his proposed new funds for these kids amounts to less than a single day of military spending. Regardless, the Los Angeles Times reported that such “education reform” is a “signature issue” backed by Democrats and Republicans.

    Political differences do exist, however. Some Democrats have responded that the president’s proposed funding increase for poor students falls far short of what’s needed. This qualifies as the understatement of the young new year.

    Both parties supported the No Child Left Behind Act that Bush signed on Jan. 8, 2002. The NCLBA partly allocates funds to low-income families to move their children from inferior to superior schools. The funding is also available to pay tutors for after-school instruction.

    Yet if educational opportunity was more than a word used to dupe the public, Congress and the president could have transferred tens of billions of taxpayer dollars from the Pentagon for Star Wars to public schools for smaller class sizes. But that was not to be. So goes the politics of education reform in the U.S.

    Puzzling? The nation’s political circles of power have their priorities. High on the list is fully funding the Pentagon, not public schools.

    The absence of evidence that military spending is more socially useful than education spending is evidence of the absence of critical journalism on these two subjects. To be sure, exceptions to this sorry state of affairs do exist. Regrettably, they are too few to shape public opinion much.

    Concerning the NCLBA, the LA Times article noted that, “Some critics have said that approach emphasizes standardized testing at the expense of instructional time and imposes unfair penalties on problem schools.” Bush disagreed, shifting the criticism to unchanging schools where teachers fail students. “Instead of getting excuses, parents will now get choices,” he said.

    Particularly, market choices are what await these parents. The Republican White House and Congress firmly back the competition of the marketplace as the path to social improvement. Presumably, the GOP’s mission to level the educational playing field by removing market fetters will unleash the untapped learning potential of poor students.

    Positive education results, we can be sure, will follow the mandatory math and reading tests, given annually by states, to needy students in the third through eighth grades under the NCLBA. This testing requirement begins in fall 2005. Then, states will be able to determine which students are (not) learning their lessons.

    Such testing is “the only way” to make accurate educational evaluations, according to the president. One standardized test fits all. More marketization of education means more standardization in public schools.

    The LA Times article also reported that the Bush administration has boosted total federal expenditures on public education to $22 billion, a 40 percent increase, for the current instructional year. Crucially, this overall amount of public school spending pales in comparison to the current Pentagon budget of about $400 billion. Here are two public programs that receive disproportionate amounts of tax dollars, but aren’t generally reported in relation to each other.

    The contrast between the two programs is stark. Accordingly, the political priorities are self-evident once people are informed. To this end, they need journalists with independent news media to buck the conventional wisdom and give the business of war more than a wink and a nod.

    Meanwhile, low-income households are being used as pawns by political power interested in scoring points around reform of the nation’s underfunded public schools. But the marketization of education is no more a solution to the substandard schools that poor U.S. kids attend than “smart bombs” are the tools to liberate the Iraq people from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein. Many in the U.S. would no doubt vote to transfer their taxes from the Pentagon to public schools if the politics of education reform was made clearer.
    *Seth Sandronsky is an editor with Because People Matter, Sacramento’s progressive newspaper.

  • The Art of Living: Santa Paula’s Xavier Montes Walks (and Teaches) the Talk

    Santa Paula native Xavier Montes remembers his ascent into social advocacy. A self-proclaimed “reborn Chicano,” he learned Spanish while visiting a relative in Mexico who challenged his limited vocabulary. While there, he extended his knowledge of culture and history by studying the meaning of traditional Mexican songs. His first attendance at a folklorico dance event in 1971 evoked feelings of awe—the sombreros looked like trophies, he said.

    A month later, he saw Teatro Campesino, with Chicano actors performing skits on controversial issues. From there, his transformation into a socially aware artist and musician was under way.

    And now, if you hear a harp at a community event, Montes is probably behind the strumming. If you see a mural in Santa Paula, chances are he had some input into the design. If you dine at Vince’s Café on Main and 8th streets, you’ll be surrounded by his acrylics.

    “My cultural heritage is filled with color and passion,” he tells the Santa Paula Society of the Arts. “It is in my veins and my heart. And so, like many other artists, I am compelled to creatively express what I feel, what I see and what I wish I could see.”

    And his commitment to his culture’s youth, in fact, stands as a work of art itself. In April, Santa Paula’s California Oil Museum will host Montes’ annual De Colores art exhibit for the ninth consecutive year. Montes views the show as a bridge between the community and the schools, two worlds he says need stronger ties: “How can you have cultural events,” he asks, “without students?”

    Montes, 50, views students as the lifeblood of community artwork. Students, he explains, are the ones who should care about their community, and the community should give them ample opportunities to become involved.

    On Montes’ wish list is a De Colores nonprofit organization to support year-round activities for students and community members. His greatest hope, though, is that Santa Paula will have a community art space for young people to develop their skills and talents.

    He has scoped a few windowfronts on Santa Paula’s Main Street, and he knows what the places would need: tables, chairs, art supplies, easels and personnel with the technical expertise to renovate and prepare the space. He adds that such a venture is especially important in the face of arts underfunding in high schools.

    “There are no painting classes in small high schools,” he lamented. “Those are for bigger schools.” Without this investment in creativity, he added, students develop their own means of expression that can result in the destruction of property.

    There’s a sadness and an irony involved, Montes said, when Mexican storeowners’ buildings are routinely defaced by young people of the same race and heritage (“How can they deface their own people’s property?”). He adds that he wants Santa Paula’s teenagers to take pride in the businesses their people have maintained through hard work and dedication.

    Montes, known to close friends as X, walks his talk. He takes his concern to the streets, working on murals with students and guiding them through the process of creating a public work of art. “I teach them techniques,” he said, “like how to blow up smaller images into larger ones using the grid method, planning it all out. The transformation starts with words on paper, ideas like love, pain, pride, future [and] family, and we narrow it down to a few ideas. Then we find symbols for those words, transferring the idea to a visual symbol. Next, we lay out the symbols, considering the viewership—what do we want people to notice first, how will they interpret the mural. This is a process, not a goal with an end point.”

    Montes has a degree in studio art and a teaching credential from UCSB. He serves as a mentor for the CalArts Visual Arts Program, helping to select young Latino and Latina artists who would benefit from summer classes.

    Montes sighed with concern over the fact that many young Latinos are ashamed of their heritage and culture, recalling once having felt similarly. He continues to work patiently with his students, facilitating their growth process as artists and as human beings. Students from Renaissance High School give him high marks; they have even taken on their own independent muraling projects using knowledge and skills learned in his classes.

    His students’ murals often deal with the themes of Mexican musical history and the Mexican revolution, events their grandparents and great-grandparents experienced. And while the students are painting, they hear Montes’ voice.

    “The scenes involve positive thinking,” he said. “I talk about pride, brown skin and the rich history of the Mexican people. And I tell them that the only way to get ahead is through education. Ignorance is the reason for the ‘isms,’ like racism and hatred.”
    *Leah C. Wells, a Santa Paula teacher, serves as peace education coordinator for the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation in Santa Barbara.

  • Policies of Mass Destruction

    There is a force – a secret force hidden wisely from our view – that makes you and me, this newspaper, our planet, our sun and the Milky Way galaxy stretching trillions of miles around us. This force is omnipresent, coursing through every particle of your body. Indeed, this force IS you. It is the most powerful force we know, a force that makes the Universe we see, by the balance – the equilibrium – in its eternal action.

    57 years ago, this equilibrium was shattered when human beings split atoms within a primitive nuclear weapon. Through intervening decades, the phrase “weapon of mass destruction” has become all too well known in our lexicon.

    I became familiar with the controversy surrounding weapons of mass destruction in the late 1970s, when my father and mother organized Utahns United Against the Nuclear Arms race, an activist movement that confronted the United States military and ultimately helped to defeat the monstrous MX missile “shell game” basing plan. Before and since that era, other historic visionaries have battled the nuclear weapon insanity and its obscene policy fig leaf, mutually assured destruction.

    But life took me in other directions. into business, investment, and the technology breakthroughs of Silicon Valley. For more than a decade I pursued the American entrepreneurial dream as a CEO, driven by innovation and measured by profit. I was successful and content in this pursuit. That is, until I came to appreciate that there are other kinds of weapons of mass destruction than those launched from bunkers, subs and planes.

    Since 1998, I have come to realize that weapons of mass destruction come in many forms.

    A global economic program that rapes the natural world is a weapon of mass destruction far more lethal than any device in any arsenal of this world.

    An energy policy that invests in destructive rather than benign production is a weapon of mass destruction.

    Copyright and patent laws that artificially inflate the cost of sharing stories, songs, and science are weapons of mass destruction.

    Education systems that fail our children are weapons of mass destruction.

    Media that places ratings over truth is a weapon of mass destruction.

    A national security policy that shreds the sacred civil liberties within our democracy, and which sheds the international obligations between democracies, is a weapon of mass destruction.

    Indeed, a nation – our nation – whose high-school history teacher has a deeper grasp of world affairs than the man it entrusts with the future history of the world… is a weapon of mass destruction.

    To be sure, Saddam Hussein’s attempts to develop devices of mass destruction must be halted by the community of nations. But at the same time, we must ask ourselves: how can such devices best be eliminated from every nation’s arsenal? Shall it be by the development, testing and deployment of more such devices by a 21st century empire? Or rather by the global abolition of them, and a global program of verification, catalyzed by the greatest democracy the world has ever known?

    To me, one thing seems certain: we will not succeed in eliminating devices of mass destruction while we fail in eliminating policies of mass destruction. I find myself in rare agreement with George Bush in saying that we cannot allow the world’s worst leaders to use the world’s most dangerous weapons. I am hard pressed to identify a single major policy initiative of the Bush administration that is not a weapon of mass destruction.

    The elections of 2002 and 2004 are our opportunities for regime change. Let us use them wisely.

  • Combat is the Wrong Answer for Alienated Youth

    Re: Raymond Marquez’s Nov. 4 letter, “Draft gang members”:

    The letter by Mr. Marquez asserts that the front lines in war would be a more appropriate place for our gang members than the streets in our country. He does not see America as a war zone, whereas many young people do. They are fighting for attention, for recognition and for legitimacy.

    Because we teach them little about nonviolent power, about changing the dynamic of the “powerful few” and the “powerless many,” about organizing themselves toward a greater good, and about structures of systemic and institutionalized violence, they use what they perceive as their only power: violence through brute force.

    I see every day the origins of their careless, bad attitudes and their sense of disenfranchisement from society. They are concerned about the basics: money, food and their personal safety, things that, as a caring society, we should be providing in an attempt to raise a compassionate generation ready to lead us in the future.

    Yet, nearly 25 percent of kids in America live in poverty, while we spend $350 billion annually on our military. Funding for education, justice, housing assistance and social programs together makes up less than one-third of the military’s budget. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once said that a “country spending more on its military than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

    Our young people know where our priorities are because the money we spend, or refuse to spend, speaks volumes about what we value: money, weaponry and absolute power.

    When gangs fight on the streets, the violence is illegal and punishable with jail time, but when they train and fight in the military, the violence becomes legitimate. Right time, right place, right enemy and they get a medal of honor and money for college.

    Wrong time, wrong city, wrong enemy, they become immersed in the prison-industrial system of injustice. This mixed message is exactly what Mr. Marquez suggests we employ in our country.

    His suggestion is both classist and bigoted. Instead of only sending the already poor and disenfranchised young people in gangs to war, why do we not also send the sons and daughters of the members of Congress who have voted so adamantly and unilaterally for this war in Afghanistan?

    Not even those orchestrating this war, namely Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, served in the armed forces. Are the lives of gang members less worthy and more disposable than the decision-makers’? Additionally, if Mr. Marquez believes that a healthy dose of combat will shape up our gang members, I wonder if he believes, too, that the veterans of the Vietnam War were better socialized in American society after serving in the armed forces.

    Not even our classrooms are exempt from military indoctrination. Education in America already encourages institutionalized violence through participation in the armed forces. Because administrators and teachers have more to worry about than military recruiters on campus, the Pentagon has an unobstructed avenue into the consciences of our youth in high schools. Whether through brochures in the career counselor’s office, or on television through Channel One, a “news” channel that advertises for one of its primary sponsors, the Pentagon, the captive high school audience is in prime marketing territory for the military.

    In recent years, more than $1 trillion has been cut in aid to cities and those funds have been reappropriated for usage by our military, with little accountability to the American public and certainly no accountability to our youth and future generations who will have to live in the militarized world we have created. When students believe they have no future, their actions reflect their inner emotions.

    In an open letter to a newspaper on May 5, students from Los Angeles High School outlined their gripes in their own words: “How can you blame us for doing poorly as students when you are doing poorly as parents? You should insist on the right to be good parents. If your employers complain when you have to go to a parent-teacher conference, tell them that most juvenile crime would disappear if only the adults would take charge of their children.”

    In this letter, the class demands that we build more schools to accommodate the growing student population, that we take them to museums instead of the malls, and that we, the adults, clean up our acts and take responsibility for our skewed priorities.

    Instead, every day, 200 new prison cells are built, according to the War Resisters League. In March 2000, Proposition 21 was passed in California creating a death penalty for people under 18, and directly violating international law.

    The Convention on the Rights of the Child, ratified by every country other than the United States and Somalia, clearly identifies people under the age of 18 as requiring special protection and exempting them from being treated as adults, especially in a court of law.

    The solution is not new. We need to provide health care to every person, we need to engage in restorative justice rather than punitive justice, and we need to allocate enough money to schools so that teachers are well-paid, classrooms are well-maintained and higher education is accessible to anyone who wishes to continue studying.

    What we don’t need are more people telling kids how bad they are, and providing suggestions for how to get rid of the problem of delinquent youth in our society.

    Perhaps I have learned more from my students about wisdom, compassion and value than they have learned from me. My students are my role models, all of them. Being around gang members and troublemakers reminds me how far we have to go in creating an equitable society and encourages me in the struggle for justice.

    *Leah C. Wells is the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s Peace Education Coordinator.

  • Learning About Peacemaking Is a Step Toward Ending Violence

    Orginally published in the Los Angeles Times Ventura County Edition

    Martin Luther King, Jr. said that our choice is not between nonviolence and violence, but a choice between nonviolence and nonexistence. Statistically we are told that crime has steadily decreased for the past eight years, however we also feel an increasingly random, yet eerily personalized, degree of susceptibility to being victimized. Our neighborhoods and schools, once thought inviolable, are now the target of more 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 own 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 of them. Yet when we pull up the flower by the roots, we have isolated the problem and fixed it. Nonviolence education is like this. Educating young people about how to deal with the problems they face on a daily basis, as well as how to organize to fix world issues, is the most effective means to solving the endemic violence which has infiltrated nearly every corner of society.

    Through a structured, semester-long curriculum, students from junior high through college can read about the foundations, successes, and actors in the nonviolence movement. Exposing a young student to Gandhi and Thoreau can cause a permanent commitment to living a life of nonviolence. At the very least, it allows students to examine the institutional paradigms which 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 alternative 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 our future generations to whom we have left a legacy of destruction and might-makes-right domination.

    Societal trends seem to be working against the nonviolence cause. For example,our government allocates $289 billion for the Pentagon, and only $25 billion to Aid for Families with Dependent Children. Our justice system continues to be punitive rather than restorative, with little or no rehabilitation occurring in detention facilities despite the obvious need. New laws penalize communities and provide nothing for the welfare of victims nor restore the dignity of offenders, like the juvenile justice legislation Proposition 21 which was passed on March 7. 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 which suffered to create fashion or food, nor do we inform them of the environmental impact of the trash which they create. And by no means do we tell them that these situations are inextricably linked, either.

    Yet there is hope! Learning about peacemaking is the first step to righting these inegalitarian situations. Students become aware that injustices exist; they then accept these injustices as tangible and real. Next, students must absorb this information in a utilitarian way; finally, they are ready to take action. The beauty of nonviolence curriculum is that it is available to everyone: it works at Georgetown University, as well as at maximum-security juvenile detention facilities. Deep-thinking is highly encouraged, and reflective and action-oriented writing is often assigned to students in nonviolence classes. Because this material speaks to students as co-proprietors of authority, rather than as subordinates, they tend to internalize the pacifist messages quickly and discreetly. It subtly permeates their thoughts and actions.

    We cannot continue to cheat our students by doling out tidbits of revisionist history. They deserve to know about Jeanette Rankin, Dorothy Day, and Oscar Romero. Institutionalizing nonviolence remains the goal, and to clearly send that message we must bring this peace studies class to our school boards and curriculum committees, and maintain persistence and fidelity to the cause of peacemaker education.

  • Nonviolence: Teacher Explores Finding Peaceful Paths In Life

    Invoking the words of Gandhi and Thoreau, a young Ventura teacher is spreading the message of nonviolence to all who will listen.

    Wearing a pin proclaiming “Victory over Violence,” 23-year-old Leah Wells leads a class in nonviolence at a downtown Ventura church. Her students are young, middle-aged and old, but they share a common goal: making peace.

    Dressed smartly in pearls and a black skirt and sweater, Wells teaches the course after a full day as an English and French teacher at St. Bonaventure High School. She begins one evening with a video decrying violence. Her students, gathered in the basement of the Church of Religious Science, quietly watch it.
    Its message is clear: violence is all around.

    “Everywhere you look, you see it,” the video says. “It’s in the school. It’s in the park. It’s everywhere.”

    Students read a passage written by pacifist and folk singer Joan Baez. They discuss ways to calm angry people. Wells leads them in discussions touching on the death penalty and the economics of war. The evening culminates with a speech by Carol Rosin, a former defense company official who urges their help in keeping weapons out of space.

    The course is structured around “Solutions to Violence,” a book developed by the Center for Teaching Peace in Washington, D.C.

    Two years ago, Wells started working as an intern for the center’s founder, noted writer and teacher Colman McCarthy.

    McCarthy wrote for the Washington Post for several years, but also is known for the nonviolence courses he developed to teach students how to resolve conflicts peacefully. His reach has extended from poor urban schools in East St. Louis to wealthy suburban schools in California, says an article in the nationally published Education Week.

    “We are peace illiterates,” he told Education Week.

    Leah Wells would like to change that in this corner of the world.
    She wants to see courses on nonviolence offered in schools as well as juvenile detention centers in Ventura, Santa Barbara and Los Angeles counties.
    “So many of the peace people are working with good kids, but we’ve got to focus on kids that are struggling,” she said.

    The Georgetown University graduate said she was inspired by her own parents. They taught her to do the right thing, that one’s word is one’s bond and that people should fight for justice, she said.
    “Violence comes from fear, fear from misunderstanding, misunderstanding from ignorance,” Wells said. “Ignorance is addressed through education.”

    She has taught nonviolence classes at a high school near the White House and at a juvenile prison in Maryland, she said. Next fall she will be teaching an elective course in nonviolence at St. Bonaventure, assuming that 20 to 25 students at the Catholic school sign up for the semesterlong offering. That will mark the first time St. Bonaventure has offered such a course, said the principal, Brother Paul Horkan.
    Wells said Los Angeles High School is already offering the course, and officials at various juvenile facilities are considering it.

    Such classes, though, are hardly ordinary. California schools offer training in conflict resolution to staff and students, but not usually as the separate courses that Wells envisions.

    Bill White, administrator of the state Safe Schools and Violence Prevention Office, said schools usually offer conflict resolution as an extracurricular activity. Some of these peacemaking skills also are incorporated into other classes, he said.

    “It’s not a stand-alone course,” White said. “I really don’t know how many of those there might be.”

    Dealing with the approvals required by education and government does not seem to sway Wells’ fervor.

    “She keeps pushing for what she wants,” Horkan said.

    Recalling the words of Thoreau, she puts it another way.
    “You are your own majority of one,” she said.