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āDuck and coverā: the evolution of peace education at the beginning of the nuclear age
Ian M. Harrisa and Charles F. Howlettb
aEmeritus, University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, Milwaukee, WI, USA; bEducation Division, Molloy College, Rockville Centre, NY, USA
This article will provide an historical analysis of the various trends within the field of peace education/peace studies during the beginning of the nuclear age. It will provide an overview of how peace education grew from noted grassroots organizations to school-based programs and in academic societies devoted to peace education and conflict resolution. The historical record of the past 50 years or so provides a progression of peace education/peace studies from an antidote to the science of war to a comprehensive examination of the causes of violence and related strategies for peace. Furthermore, this analysis offers a thorough examination of the evolution of peace ideology after the World War II when weapons of mass destruction presented a direct threat to humankindās existence. While peace efforts have always been a part of American history, the burgeoning field of peace education/peace studies gained academic credibility as a direct result of developing atomic and nuclear weapons. To a great extent, we are still living in the first nuclear age and attempts to oppose war and promote social justice inside and outside schoolhouse gates should be understood through the lens of history.
Introduction
When renewed hostilities between the USA and the former Soviet Union were reaching a crescendo during the first years of the Ronald Reagan Administration in the early 1980s, the late historian Charles DeBenedetti decided to examine numerous education journals to find out what teachers had to say about the role of armaments and the advent of the āatomic age.ā Perusing some 14 academic journals such as The American Educator, Educational Leadership, School and Society, The Elementary School Journal, Social Education, and The Harvard Educational Review, he expressed disappointment that many in the academic community had given up hope for atomic disarmament as early as the mid-1950s. How did national security concerns supplant the overarching concerns educators had so vigorously expressed on behalf of disarmament and world peace in the immediate years after the conclusion of World War II? What accounts for their silence and did educators interested in peaceful coexistence really abandon their hopes?
Initially, shortly after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, āā¦ American educators concluded that peace was āthe overwhelming problem for mankindā ā the one question which āovershadows all other questions.ā Dreams of defense through superior military strength were attractive but self-deluding.ā Hence, nearly all leading practitioners ābelieved that the campaign among educators to rally people in the face of the global crisis would prove vital to American education as well as to world peace.ā Unfortunately, what these journals ultimately revealed was that
in the name of defending fundamental freedoms [when threatened by McCarthyism and Cold War fears], a key segment of the American policymaking elite retreated from the fight for an organized peace with foreigners into the seeming safety of unilateral military preparations for a peace that never came to be. (DeBenedetti 2009)
And, along with that retreat were the educators who suddenly chose to āduck and coverā under the guise of national self-defense.1
Certainly, one of the ironies of the post-World War II era was that antirevisionists liberals, fearful of a return to a post-World War I pattern of isolationist pacifism, resorted to a militant, interventionist nationalism, which they subconsciously pawned off as idealistic internationalism. These so-called war liberals, who previously championed a leftist cause during the dark days of the Great Depression of the 1930s, were now competing with conservatives for leadership in the battle against Communism. Those educators who once sounded the trumpet for peace through education found it almost impossible not to withdraw in the face fears of Armageddon that led to the theory of containment and peace through force.
The development of peace studies as an academic field
Such retreat, however, did not imply that all efforts at peace education had met their fate. The road traveled was arduous and challenging. It was also a very long road, which took considerable time to traverse. Following the lead of peace researchers, a new academic field, peace studies, was being born. As early as the 1950s, scholars started to develop the field of peace research as a āscience of peaceā to counteract the science of war that had produced so much mass killing in the 1940s. These peace researchers established theories, data, and methodological evaluations of different approaches to peace. Some common themes of early peace research were disarmament, causes of war, conflict theory, international relations, and military spending (Harris and Schuster, 2006, passim; Morrison 2005; Schmidt 2000, 6; Wallenstein 1998, 9ā22, passim; Wein 1984, passim). In this respect, one of the more noticeable contributions, which evolved in the 50s and took root in the early 1960s, was the work of the esteemed Quaker economist Kenneth Boulding. While at the University of Michigan, Boulding published a theoretical analysis of conflict resolution entitled Conflict and Defense (1962). Basically, a work of statistical compilation, Bouldingās study was the first of its kind in America to analyze social and international conflicts by means of formal analytical models, derived from a large number of disciplines. With Bouldingās leadership, a Center for Research in Conflict Resolution was formally established at the University of Michigan devoted to peace research and conflict resolution.
The Center reflected three major beliefs of its founder: humanity is good, the war system is evil, and knowledge that is more powerful is necessary to transform the system, thus it represented an unusual alliance between humanistic wisdom and social science data. The primary purpose of the Center was to apply quantitative knowledge to social forces in order to build upon the premise that the national state is obsolete and that reliance on research, statistics, and information represents a way out of reliance on military force. In terms of peace studies, Bouldingās efforts were significant. He and the Center gave academic credence to it as a research discipline worthy of serious examination. A major effort was now underway to transform perceptions regarding justifications for increase of expenditures for arms in the name of national security. What the Center attempted to explain was that tax dollars for arms meant less money for domestic social development. Thus, the initial thrust in peace studies was to utilize social science data in support of economic social reconstruction rather than a military-industrial complex thereby reinforcing mutually assured destruction between the worldās two greatest superpowers.
There were many within and outside the academic community who argued that peace studies had very little to offer in terms of āreal scholarshipā and were primarily politically motivated. Some went so far as to insist that this new area of study lacked focus and discipline given the complexities associated with war and peace. It also became fashionable to attack those teaching and studying peace issues as anarchists, communists, and pacifists.2 They were ridiculed as subversives for challenging the hegemony of the US military establishment. Over time, all that would change as the early years of experimentation resulted in programs more rigorous in academic content and serious in focus.
Its evolution actually began when some individuals, frightened by the Cold War rhetoric of a nuclear exchange between the USA and the Soviet Union, decided to organize workshops, classes, college courses, teach-ins, and protests, in order to change the stated policies of the US Government. Motivated by the desire to act and express their concerns regarding world peace, they blended their inner faith with outer intent to become āspiritual agents of social changeā (Denning 1993). In terms of peace education, it suggested that ordinary people could create change together by mobilizing inner resources, as well as material resources (Denning 2010). Thus, what started out as individual acts of conscience soon developed into voluntary associations in which citizen actors engaged in peace activities as volunteers in order to educate the public. This was grassroots peace education/peace activism at it best and one notable example is the established organization known as Peace Action today. Founded in 1957, as the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, SANE achieved notoriety in the early 1980s during the worldwide Freeze Campaign when it had over 240 local groups, 24 state organizations, and 170,000 national members (Denning 2010). Thus, in the face of the overwhelming challenge of trying to reverse the escalation of nuclear weapons brought about by the cold war, people found that by practicing peace education, whether in terms of classroom instruction or through community-based organizations, they could influence others and gain a sense of accomplishment in a scenario that seemed so helpless. As one practitioner observed:
If you wanted to bring about a change in peopleās belief and behavior, a change that would persist and serve as an example to others, you needed to create community around them, where those new beliefs could be practiced, and expressed and nurtured. (Gladwell 2002, 173)
The most dramatic and expansive peace education efforts occurred after the contentious and divisive Vietnam War had ended. Although peace studies courses and sometimes entire departments or majors were created by universities and colleges during the Vietnam War, their creation was due not to the dangers of nuclear war but to the social activism aroused during the decade of the 1960s. Merging with the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, and student radicalism, the establishment of new peace curriculums was the dual desire to consider both the philosophical foundations of pacifism and its practical political applications. During this period, peace studies courses, for instance, and sometimes entire departments and majors were established at places of higher learning such as Colgate University, Notre Dame, Georgetown, Boston College, Wittenberg University, Kent State, Earlham College, and Columbia University, among others (the first peace studies program was actually established at Manchester College in 1948). Many of these peace studies programs were subdisciplines of major academic subjects, thus breathing new life and purpose into their objectives and outcomes. Perhaps the most important by-product of this occurrence was developing curricula for use in the classroom covering areas such as global problems, peacemaking and nonviolence, women and world order, hunger and the politics of food distribution, ecological balance, militarism and the arms race, international law, human rights, culture and community, and the religious meaning of peace. These initial efforts, however, were more reactive than proactive because they were in response to the antiVietnam War sentiment ā subjects to study rather than to act on ā and bore little resemblance to those grassroots efforts and community-based programs, which emerged in the 1980s and would continue to have a profound impact on the development of peace education in the USA.
What prompted such awareness to the importance of peace education, both in the academy and in the community, came in response to Ronald Reaganās ramping up the arms race in the cold war and stating that the US could win a nuclear war. International teams of scientists showed that a nuclear war between the US and the Soviet Union could produce a ānuclear winter.ā The smoke from vast fires started by bombs dropped on cities and industrial areas would envelop the planet and absorb so much sunlight that the earthās surface would get cold, dark, and dry, killing plants worldwide and eliminating our food supply. Surface temperatures would reach winter values. In the 1980s, this threat of nuclear war stimulated educators all around the world to warn of impending devastation. Peace educators in the USA, effectively and compellingly, highlighted an era acutely concerned about the threat of nuclear annihilation. Important scholarly works with a practical and pedagogical approach were published. Among the most important of these works were Elise Bouldingās Building a Global Civic Order, Betty Reardonās Comprehensive Peace Education, and Ian Harrisā Peace Education.3 All three peace educators established their own courses at their respective campuses. They developed a holistic approach to peace education that could apply in community education, elementary and secondary schools, as well as college classrooms. They also emphasized that a peaceful pedagogy must belong to any attempt to teach about peace. The key ingredients of such pedagogy are cooperative learning, democratic community, moral sensitivity, and critical thinking.
At the same time, massive antinuclear demonstrations in the 1980s led to a rapid growth in peace studies programs on college campuses (in June 1982 over 800,000 people demonstrated in New York). In 1986, there were over 100 peace studies programs in the USA and thousands of courses on the nuclear threat on college campuses and high school classrooms:
Broader support from the mainstream ā religious leaders, lawyers, and other professionals ā meant that the response to peace education on campuses met with much less resistance than had the teach-ins of the Vietnam War. Momentum grew in 1982, when 400 social scientists gathered at New York City to discuss āThe Role of the Academy in Addressing the Threat...
