Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: peace education

  • Building a Culture of Peace

    Building a culture of peace means that we begin educating our young children on personal, local, national and international issues of conflict and violence. All too often, education and dialogue is reserved for undergraduate, post-graduate and professional circles, ignoring the vast resource of youthful enthusiasm and exploration which high school-aged students can provide. The institutions of government, military, and popular media wage educational campaigns to inundate young people’s lives with violent images and wasteful propaganda. If a culture of peace is what we want to provide for the future generations, then we must begin to explicitly *teach peace*. In the United States, this may mean restructuring the academic calendar to make learning at school more permanent rather than seasonal, and it may mean challenging our system of “accountability” where we are teaching our kids to test rather than teaching them to learn and think.

    Furthermore, kids learn by example. So if we want them to learn nonviolence and healthy conflict management, we as a nation must become more vigilant in creating compassionate policies for education, healthcare, foreign countries, immigration, nuclear energy and weapons of mass destruction. As a high school teacher of nonviolence, I tell my students that if they want to know where their priorities are, they should track where they spend their money. Does it go to transportation expenditures, to new clothes or movies, or does it go to charitable causes? Students see where their governments’ priorities are when they learn of the disparity between the defense budget and the education budget.

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

  • Non Violent Curriculum for Kids

    Orginally published in the Los Angeles Times Ventura County Edition

    The degree of violence in our world today, represented in our media via the television, newspapers, and internet, is deplorable. We are continuously handed pre-formulated thoughts that bombing, divorcing, and fighting are the only ways to solve disputes. With overflowing prison populations, guns in school, and escalating domestic abuse, it is no wonder that profound powerlessness and despair fester within our culture. What do we do about these problems? How do we go about reversing the cycles of inegalitarian practices which oppress so many? Whom can we solicit to address the questions of bringing peace to our disquieted world? I think I have the answer.

    Nonviolence education is a systematic curriculum designed to awaken students’ minds to the possibilities of thinking outside the ‘might makes right’ paradigm, allowing them to view global human rights as a part of their own cause, not something distinct from their own personal life experience. Peace studies education teaches the view of history from those who have worked for radical social change and fighting injustices; it promotes the values of constructive conflict prevention and resolution as well as nonviolent resistance and direct social action. Students acquire a comprehensive view of the current global situation by learning the links between poverty, religion, economics, governmental policies, technology, environment and education. In exploring alternatives to violence, students gain knowledge about their life choices, for example selective service registration. They also gain a context for their daily lives, like investigating the origins of the products they purchase and consume, i.e. whether they were tested on animals sprayed with pesticides, or what the lives, wages, and treatment of the producers are like. Peace studies education gives students the tools to constructively deal with the problems they encounter on both a personal and worldly level, as well as helping them to understand their responsibility for elevating the collective human experience.

    After teaching a revolutionary and widely successful class through the Center for Teaching Peace in Washington, D.C. last year in an urban high school and a juvenile prison, I can see a change in students’ attitudes: a motivation to mobilize toward the common cause of improving the well-being of the planet and its inhabitants. Colman McCarthy, who directs the aforementioned Center, suggests that peace rooms be designated in all schools for the resolution of disputes, and that programs be implemented so that students can become ‘peer mediators’ who serve as impartial negotiators for conflicts between fellow students. Why is peace studies not a mandatory class in school, especially when it reaches the core of how to interact and get along? What is so subversive about teaching the origins of the Hague Court, rooted in the early peace churches of Colonial America? Why is there suspicion with regards to questioning where our tax dollars go? Why is conflict management not an integral part of our school curriculum, like math or science?

    There is more money in a wartime economy than peacetime.
    We can fund an eighty-billion-dollar war, but not nonviolence classes. We can supply over three-fourths of the weapons used in the nearly forty ongoing conflicts worldwide, overtly profiting from the massacre of others, but no money can be found for teaching conflict management. At high school commencement speeches, we tell our graduating seniors to go out and be the peacemakers of the world, and yet we withhold the tools necessary to do so. Learning to co-exist with others is a fundamental component to surviving in life, and it does not necessarily come naturally or easily, especially in a world where images of violence are the norm to the point of desensitization. Our government, our leaders, our schools continuously tell us that there is just not enough money to expand the curriculum to incorporate peace studies.

    We owe it to our children to teach them that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. By implementing nonviolence classes, we can subvert the far-reaching problems associated with intolerance and mishandled anger. When we explore nonviolence curriculum we can address the problems of injustice and teach young people how to make the world more egalitarian. To effect real change and truly make a difference, each parent, each teacher-parent association, each school board, and most importantly, each student should lobby for peace studies education in each school.

    Leah Wells is a high school teacher in Ventura County, a member of Amnesty International, and personally committed to spreading nonviolence curriculum throughout our schools. She volunteers with Interface in the Youth Crisis Intervention department, as well as with the Juvenile Detention division of Ventura County.

  • Teacher Advocates Nonviolence

    Published in the Los Angeles Times

    Leah Wells has spent two years learning about nonviolence at the Center for Teaching Peace in Washington, DC, and now is sharing that knowledge with her Ventura students.

    Wells, a teacher at St. Bonaventure High School, also will teach a nonviolence class for the wider community beginning next week at the Ventura County Church of Religious Science in Ventura.

    This interactive class will teach conflict management, and the history and scope of the nonviolence movement, Wells said.

    Before joining the St. Bonaventure faculty this year, Wells explored the roots of the nonviolence movement. At the time, she served as a student teacher in the high school that is closest to the White House and was volunteering at a juvenile facility in Maryland. “I’m very passionate about this subject because I feel the ideas put forward by peace advocates like Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Dorothy Day and Albert Schweitzer are important to bring about social change and nonviolence,” Wells said.

    School violence is down, but reactivity is up, Wells said. Words and action have power. Nonviolent action is not passive.

    Wells’ lectures about the differences between violence and nonviolence go well beyond the obvious.

    “I teach my students how to make nonviolence real in their own lives,” Wells said. “We look at the effects of what violence does in families, schools and the community.”

    Her students learn nonviolent skills they can use in their own lives. They learn that violence in their community requires community members, young and old, to act, Wells said.

    “Through an issues-awareness curriculum, they learn that other people are more alike than different,” she said. “They learn how to confront their own prejudices and redefine the problems they have with other people. It is never just one person’s problem.”

    Wells teaches her students that the TV programs and news reports they choose to watch, the video games and magazines they guy, and the public policies and military actions they support all reflect a choice between violence and nonviolence.

    She talks to her students about nuclear weapons and the death penalty. They have discussed the decision by Illinois Gov. George Ryan to impose a moratorium on capital punishment after alleged misconduct by judges and attorneys and questions about evidence. Maryland’s governor and others are considering similar moratoriums.

    “Ninety-five percent of people on death row cannot afford their own attorney,” Wells said. “Poor individuals disproportionately receive death penalty sentences.”

    Sister Helen Prejean, who gave a lecture last week that Wells’ students attended, said capital punishment is aptly named because the people without capital are punished, Wells said.

    Prejean, whose story is chronicled in the movie “Dead Man Walking,” advocates a national moratorium on the death penalty, Wells said.

    Wells leads discussions with her students about Proposition 21, which strengthens penalties against youth offenders.

    “I absolutely believe that Prop. 21 is bad for the community,” Wells said. “It’s tough on crime and inflicts greater punishment, but it does nothing toward restoration of a relationship. It does nothing to benefit the victim and it objectifies the offender. It doesn’t foster trust, and it doesn’t bring that young person back into the circle.”

    Many youth offenders have never had someone on whom they could depend, someone who could show them the best way to deal with conflicts, Wells said.

    “I ask my students how they would feel if they didn’t have two people in the world who could show them the right way to be or to live. Those are the ones we are sending away,” she said.