PRE-WORLD WAR ONE THOUGHTS

Dewey's developing student-centered viewpoint also stood in sharp relief with the rigid pedagogy practiced in European states, such as Germany, around the time of World War I. He would respond to this type of education in his 1915 German Philosophy and Politics. Conformity for the sake of orderliness, he argued, was reminiscent of the Prussian system of education that Bismark imposed upon the newly established German nation-state. In the example of pre-World War I Germany (1890 to 1914), glorification and unquestioned dedication of the mother country took precedence over curiosity and inquisitiveness. That same year he worked with his daughter Evelyn examining schools in the United States that stood in stark contrast to those in Germany. “Instead of providing … for growth and discovery,” the Deweys wrote over one hundred years ago in praise of innovative schools in Schools of Tomorrow,

Prior to American involvement in World War I, he had the opportunity to express his views on education as a national versus social issue in his most widely cited book, Democracy and Education. In it, he identified the troubling role nationalism plays in education and how American schools must differentiate themselves from those in Europe. As Dewey correctly observed, “So far as Europe was concerned, the historic situation identified the movement for a state-supported education with the nationalist movement in political life—a fact of incalculable significance for subsequent movements.” Specifically targeting the Prussian state, he went on to note, “Under the influence of German thought in particular, education became a civic function and the civic function was identified with the realization of the ideal of the national state.” The end result of this development, he noted with alarm, was that “the actual practice was such that the school system, from the elementary grades through the university faculties, supplied the patriotic citizen and soldier and the future state official and administrator furnish the means for military, industrial, and political defense and expansion. …” Sadly, he concluded, “the maintenance of a particular national sovereignty required subordination of individuals to the superior interests of the state both in military defense and in struggles for international supremacy in commerce, social efficiency was understood to imply like subordination. The educational process was taken to be one of disciplinary training rather than of personal development.”Footnote ⁸

His peace thoughts in Democracy and Education, however, were primarily limited to his view of the philistine aspects associated with nationalism. He did very little to advance or discuss peace education programs such as textbook publisher Edwin Ginn's World Peace Foundation, which set up an entire library of the most famous works devoted to world peace including Immanuel Kant's Perpetual Peace, Bertha von Suttner's Lay Down Your Arms and Memoirs, Jean de Bloch's The Future of War, and Leo Tolstoy's Bethink Yourselves, among others. Nor, although aware of it, did he align his thoughts with Massachusetts schoolteacher Fannie Fern Andrews and her American School Peace League, established in 1907. In particular, Andrews, along with a group of Boston-area peace educators, Ella Lyman Cabot, Fannie Coe, Mary McSkimmon, and Mabel Hill, began working in 1910 on a four-hundred-page curriculum guide, titled A Course in Citizenship. Appearing in print in 1914, it became the standard text for training elementary school children and junior high students in the ideals of good citizenship and international understanding.Footnote ⁹ In response, after World War I, he would follow Andrews's example in calling for an education program that challenged the role of schools as “seminaries of patriotism,” despite the fact that during the war the curriculum would refocus its teaching objectives to support of the war in the name of Wilsonian internationalism.Footnote ¹⁰ Similar to Andrews, Dewey consolidated his thinking about the role of schools and need for peace.

A PRAGMATIST'S DILEMMA: CONFRONTING TOTAL WAR

At the start of the Progressive Era, Dewey shared the optimism of other advocates of peace. As a practical reform enterprise the peace movement achieved an unprecedented level of social respect marked by the appearance of over forty new peace organizations in the United States alone. As a national movement it resurrected belief in the power of human reason, progress, and the effectiveness of peacekeeping machinery supporting the goals of international arbitration and global cooperation. The coming of World War I, however, shattered such a cheery outlook.

As the United States gradually moved toward military preparedness in support of the Allied cause after 1914, Dewey began considering how the use of armed force could be utilized in order to end hostilities and bring about a permanent peace. His immediate purpose and first inclination was now to convince the American public that if armed force were to be applied, it should be done in an intelligent way in order to assist in the creation of a world order dedicated to equality and peace. This idea, discussed in two of Dewey's 1916 articles in The New Republic, “Force and Coercion” and “Force, Violence and Law,” was that coercive force and war could not be separated from the system of power politics in international diplomacy. In true pragmatic fashion, Dewey reasoned that the war could not be dissociated from the ends it sought to achieve. The question, as he saw it, was one of clarifying the dynamics of social change.

On the one hand, there was the dynamic of force. Legal force in the form of military enforcement could thus be considered a legitimate lever of social change. On the other hand, the counterargument was that violence was a wasteful force and, therefore, should be spurned. Realizing that his brand of philosophy had always called for action, Dewey believed it was possible to argue that the intelligent use of armed force was the only legitimate means by which to establish lasting peace based upon the principle of Wilsonian internationalism.

What he failed to consider, however, once the United States joined the Allied cause was the negative impact of patriotic conformity in America's public schools. More than 100,000 school districts became receptive instruments to all ideological forms of warfare. Led by the National Education Association and the Committee on Patriotism through Education, district after district banned the teaching of German and demanded loyalty oaths of schoolteachers and support personnel. The New York Legislature, for instance, went so far as to create a commission to hear and examine complaints about “seditious” textbooks in subjects like civics, history, economics, and English literature. The legislature put tremendous pressure on state education departments to require district elementary school teachers to teach the themes of patriotism, heroism, and sacrifice as well as the differences between German autocracy and the American democratic way of life.Footnote ¹¹

In many ways, New York City became the flashpoint. One Board of Education member, General Thomas Wingate, proclaimed that “the teacher who teaches pacifism and that this country should not defend itself is a thousand times more dangerous than the teacher who gets drunk and lies in the gutter.” Despite complex hearings, defense counsel, and all the appearances of a trial, the decision to fire teachers had been largely predetermined by the hysteria of the men in charge of conducting the proceedings. Throughout the city's school system, teachers were suspended or dismissed for questioning American military involvement, refusing to teach patriotism in their classes, or not taking the recently enacted loyalty oath. Somewhat sheepishly, Dewey later confided to historian Charles Beard “that nothing could be much more harmful to the real war cause in this country than giving the impression that the disloyalty issue was being used as a cloak for private and personal persecution.”Footnote ¹²

THE URGENT NEED FOR PEACE EDUCATION IN THE AFTERMATH OF A WORLD WAR

The war experience proved to be a mighty wake-up call for the esteemed educator, and numerous biographers and scholars have recounted his support for the war.Footnote ¹³ He had hoped that the war would unite a romantic national idealism with a realistic progressivism. He considered it an opportunity to further his democratic ideals as part of a greater national service. With war now at hand, there was an opportunity to test the efficiency of progressive social engineering abroad and to test the collective will of the populace to bring about the kind of democratic progress needed to rid the Old World of its political tyranny and autocracy. Of course, no one was more equipped to point out the shortcomings of Dewey's pragmatism at war than his former student Randolph Bourne.Footnote ¹⁴

What lessons did Dewey learn from the war and how did he attempt to apply it to teaching about world peace? As a matter of principle, the conflict had convinced him that war embodied collective behavior—orchestrated and propagated by powerful interest groups who were able to influence the psychology of the masses in favor of armed conflict—corrupting the entire social order as well as its political structure. He thus began working from that principle to use his philosophy and educational theories to establish alternative means for resolving human conflicts and to develop forms of group harmony so that the means—the instrument of peace—might persist as an ongoing social dynamic in the lives of all individuals.

Equally troubling was his naïve belief that the schools could promote a more humanistic approach to patriotism in time of war. The way in which school leaders imposed patriotic conformity and obedience to the dictates of the state was totally contrary to his conception of schooling for democracy. Despite calling for courageous intelligence and responsibility, the educational system quickly became structured for inculcating support for the nation-state and its military objectives. Classroom lessons quickly transformed to encourage schoolchildren to render support for the war without doubt or hesitation.Footnote ¹⁵

Dewey first began mapping out his thoughts on the importance of teaching peace while on sabbatical to Japan and China, 1919–1921. It was during his journey to the Far East that he devoted a number of his lectures to the topic of internationalism. In one of his lectures, “The Cultural Heritage and Social Reconstruction,” he established three ground rules necessary for schools to promote democratic cooperation and global citizenship. The most critical role schools should undertake is that of making “students want to fulfill their duties to society, not from compulsion, but by curiosity and willingness, and out of love for their fellow men.” Whereas before the war he directed his energies at addressing the problems associated with industrialization through schooling, he now thought education's most pressing need was to eliminate the unworthy features associated with nationalism. Cultural heritage must be preserved and must also be reconstructed so that geographical barriers will not prevent it from appreciating other cultures. “The school is the instrument by which a new society can be built,” he told Chinese students, “and through which the unworthy features of the existing society can be modified.”Footnote ¹⁶

In the 1920s, especially, Dewey called upon teachers to examine certain subjects in order to educate students about the importance of peace and consider ways that nations could address the insidious problem of nationalistic self-preservation. In so doing, his pedagogical strategy was to explore carefully ingrained cultural prejudices and see how “learning by doing” (Dewey's progressive child-centered learning) could bridge the gap between unquestioned patriotic loyalty and transnational understanding through lessons of geography, culture, history, and language.

Most importantly, the social functions of geography and history defined Dewey's view of how peace education should be taught in schools. In some regards, he now relied on the earlier curriculum ideas put forth by Andrews et al., in A Course in Citizenship that relied heavily on historical and geographic considerations. For Dewey, these particular subjects were the essential building blocks for any peace education efforts. The study of geography, for instance, must devote its attention to social and political problems. By that, Dewey meant that geography would have to take into consideration the various peoples, their cultures, their habits, their occupations, their art, and their contributions to the development of culture in general. History as well would have to divorce itself from its past emphasis on dates, heroes, and battles. Social studies textbooks must be revised so that impressionable minds will not be subjected to patriotic indoctrination under the guise of citizenship awareness.

The fundamental themes embedded in these subjects were the means for achieving the ends: democratic communal values, understanding patriotism as cooperation and not blind allegiance, moral sensitivity to other cultural heritages, critical thinking, and self-esteem for challenging entrenched customs and beliefs. “The teachers in our schools, and the communities behind the schools,” he told his students at Teachers College and readers in the Journal of Social Forces, “have a greater responsibility with reference to this international phase of social consciousness and ideals than we have realized. As we need a program and a platform for teaching genuine patriotism and a real sense of the public interests of our own community so clearly we need a program of international friendship, amity and good will.” He insisted unhesitatingly, that “We need a curriculum in history, literature and geography, which will make the different racial elements in this country aware of what each has contributed and will create a mental attitude towards other people which will make it more difficult for the flames of hatred and suspicion to sweep over this country in the future. …” Establishing this type of curriculum for public school children, “will make this impossible [hatred and suspicion], because when children's minds are in the formative period we shall have fixed in them through the medium of the schools, feelings of respect and friendliness for the other nations and peoples of the world.”Footnote ¹⁷

Pragmatically, the disparity between the two ends, war and peace, had to be addressed. In terms of war, education taught people to accept divisive behavior, promoted authoritarian methods of rule, ignored moralistic reasons for good behavior, encouraged coercion in the name of patriotic conformity, and complied with patterns of structural violence. In contrast, education for peace fostered responsibility, openness, innovation, self-motivation, cooperative behavior, and barrier-free opportunities to pursue individual interests for the common good.Footnote ¹⁸

To a considerable extent, Dewey's thoughts on the subject of peace mirrored the new approach that peace activists undertook after the war. Antiwar activists, including committed pacifists, now insisted that peace required social reform as well as social order. Unlike their prewar predecessors, the modern activists were willing to abandon the uncontroversial establishment peace reform effort marked by arbitration and government-led plans for international organization. Instead, they forcefully argued that American society and institutions would first have to change fundamentally if the United States wished to take a leading role in reforming international relations. In line with Dewey's instrumentalism, these reformers not only added a moral dimension to their methods but also a “theory of conflict and a dialectic of action in a struggle that became an ‘experiment with truth’: testing ideas through political dialogue, exemplary conduct, and communication during conflict, rather than through political violence.”Footnote ¹⁹

What is most revealing, moreover, was how Dewey applied Addams's definition of pacifism to the modern scene, which “used to stand for something … negative, for an attitude that made it easy to identify pacifism with passivism.” Abandoning his World War I criticisms of pacifists—Addams was very disappointed at his wartime remarks considering their friendship—and his earlier attempt to explain the differences between force, coercion, and violence, he now considered the peace movement's goals “vital and dynamic.” His views on internationalism aligned with those of the peace movement as part of his democratic outlook: increased acknowledgment of the economic causes of war; rejection of national self-determination in favor of a “higher” nationalism; and initiating direct, political participation from the bottom up. The form of education he wished to promote was truly grassroots democracy at work. Learning by doing also meant that children, as society's future leaders, should be taught how to build peace not “upon coercive force” or establishing “international organization of the traditional kind” but by a true understanding and vision of the “constructive meeting of human needs.”Footnote ²⁰

EDUCATION AS ACTIVISM

Perhaps the most obvious example of Dewey's efforts to link educational means to peace activism was the central role he played in the American Committee for the Outlawry of War—a campaign funded by Chicago lawyer Salmon O. Levinson in the 1920s.Footnote ²¹ During this campaign, he gave numerous speaking engagements, published many articles on why war should be made illegal, and entered into debates with critics of Levinson's campaign such as Columbia University historian James T. Shotwell, Harvard legal professor Manley O. Hudson, and the esteemed journalist Walter Lippmann. This was his political participation using a grassroots approach.

Dewey considered the outlawry movement as an extension of his democratic social psychology. He was hopeful that “a reorganization of international relations would serve to harmonize the ethics of nations with those of individuals and thus help to civilize international life.”Footnote ²² The objective of the program, as he envisioned, was to influence the minds and dispositions of the public. If more people were taught that war was a crime against humanity, coercive measures to prevent its recurrence would no longer be needed. Understanding would replace fear, and agreement would replace distrust. Quite clearly, the problem was not what reprisals a nation must fear by committing acts of blatant aggression but the immorality of doing so. If the internationalism of the modern world, in its economic, psychological, scientific, and artistic aspects, was to be truly realized, outlawry of war was the most realistic, indeed the only realistic, means for firmly establishing “an international mind to function effectively in the control of the world's practical affairs.”Footnote ²³ Historian Merle Curti put it best: “If Dewey's dedicated devotion to this program seemed naively idealistic to some of his contemporaries as well as to historians, it was nevertheless an important testimony to his conviction that war might be eliminated if the world stopped thinking in terms of war and that an unlimited national sovereignty contradicted both common sense and social and human needs.”Footnote ²⁴

Nevertheless, in keeping with his modality of critical thinking, outlawry as a reflection of liberal internationalist thought was a method for assimilating “problems of political power and moral goods to a statement of thinking, of method, to a model of action and thought.” Unfortunately, the resulting Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 renouncing war as an instrument of national policy merely addressed the issue of offensive war and provided for no means of enforcement. Dewey had been too overly optimistic that the method of intelligence would lead to the realization that outlawry, in practice, represented the culmination of public engagement and democratic deliberation.Footnote ²⁵

Still, his direct involvement in the Outlawry of War campaign contained elements of liberal internationalist thinking in which themes of progress, political emancipation, grassroots participation, law as a moral instrument, and promotion of human freedom were cast with a global scope. As scholar Molly Cochran notes regarding Dewey's political journalism, “Dewey wrote on many themes important to liberal internationalists. … What unifies these writings is an underlying concern that the moral inclusion of individuals be made effective in the relations between states, that a new diplomacy should arise out of the destruction of World War I …[giving] recognition to the humanity of each individual and assist[ance] in the development of human capacities, making manifest the idea of democracy in international affairs.”Footnote ²⁶

Few of Dewey's ideas on peace education took root in the 1930s.Footnote ²⁷ The rise of military dictatorships and the eventual outbreak of the Second World War put aside any thoughts with regard to establishing peace education programs. However, in the aftermath of World War II, the Cold War, and the threat of nuclear war, a renewed interest in peace education appeared. This new development was based upon five fundamental principles that Dewey first suggested when addressing how schools could develop social ideals and social consciousness among children during the interwar period: (1) building a democratic community, (2) teaching cooperation, (3) creating an environment based upon moral sensitivity, (4) promoting critical thinking, and (5) empowering self-esteem to challenge established modes of national behavior.Footnote ²⁸ Although Dewey died in 1952 and wrote only a few articles related to world peace after World War II due to advancing age, his earlier call for teachers to focus on international understanding assumed greater importance with the threat of atomic and later nuclear weapons.

CREATION OF PEACE EDUCATION PROGRAMS

The development of peace education programs after World War II focused on ways to teach about the threats of violence and the promise of peace in light of the war's experience. Educators relied on Dewey's five principles for building peaceful communities. He was the first prominent educator in the United States after World War I to begin calling attention to the need for teaching the positive benefits of world peace in the classroom. “Education,” as Dewey wrote in his magnum opus, “is that reconstruction or reorganization of experience which adds to the meaning of experience and which increases ability to direct the course of subsequent experience.”Footnote ²⁹

Dewey's concept of “growth” defined the aim of education as that of civilized individuals transforming their society, not adapting to it. Dewey's influence is in the belief that accepting the custom of war is adaptation; creating a peaceful world is transformative. This view helped shape the growing interest in peace education in the last half of the last century despite some doubts as to its scholarly legitimacy. To a considerable extent, peace education has largely been focused on analysis for action—finding instruments as means for establishing peaceful cultures as the end. According to peace education historian Aline Stomfay-Stitz, “Peace education has been studied at various times by scholars, activists, and reformers in the United States as a way to bring about greater harmony among groups of people, primarily through schools and classrooms. However, the history of peace education in America is largely hidden, and the legitimacy of the field has always been questioned in terms of its goals for research and advocacy.”Footnote ³⁰ Any metric for determining its success in schools and nontraditional settings still remains indeterminate. This may very well be because peace education is not designed to tell people what to think about the future but rather how to think about it—the very foundation of Dewey's own instrumentalist philosophy.

Although it is apparent that teaching peace has met with limited success in American education, the first peace studies course in higher education was established by the Church of the Brethren at Manchester College in Indiana in the late 1940s. Manchester built a curriculum based upon nonviolent strategies and courses examining social and international conflicts. This influenced many other programs, almost all of which came about during the Vietnam period. “Against the backdrop of violence and dissent in the 1960s, peace education became a legitimate, credible discipline,” Stomfay-Stitz points out. A plethora of curricula were created for classroom use, covering the areas of global issues, peacemaking and nonviolence, women and world order, teacher training in nonviolence, hunger and the politics of food distribution, ecological balance, militarism and the arms race, international law and organizations, human rights and social justice, democratic citizenship, international understanding, and culture and community, among others.Footnote ³¹ The basic goal of all these programs was to solve the essential problems of any given society: to change the deeply rooted patterns of violent behavior in favor of a culture of peace.

Since 1950, a number of peace-related organizations and educational programs have been established, including the Consortium on Peace Research Education and Development (COPRED); a branch of the International Peace Research Association (IPRA); the Peace Education Center at Columbia University Teachers College; Priscilla Prutzman's Children's Creative Response to Conflict Program based out of the international peace organization the Fellowship of Reconciliation; Educators for Social Responsibility, which continues to provide teaching resources and programs for K–12 schools; and The Peace Education Commission (PEC), a network of elementary and secondary teachers interested in promoting peace education and also a part of IPRA. In addition, the publication of Maria Montessori's Education and Peace (1972) provided a philosophy and rationale for an emergent pedagogy in peace education using child-centered learning practices. It was soon followed by the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development's 1973 landmark publication titled Education for Peace: Focus on Mankind. In the 1980s and 1990s, other peace education programs were established including the Louis D. Brown Foundation at the Harvard University School of Public Health, the Cooperative Learning Center administered through the University of Minnesota, and the Florida Institute for Peace Education and Research. Perhaps the legitimacy of peace education as a worthy discipline came with the establishment in 2004 of the Journal of Peace Education, which is devoted to all scholarly aspects related to the discipline of teaching about peace, domestically and internationally.Footnote ³²

THE DEWEYAN PERSPECTIVE OF PEACE THROUGH A TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY LENS

How have Dewey's ideas regarding peace influenced the practice of peace education today and why have they not been more successful? In many ways, World War I taught Dewey that education and schooling remains the moral template for using power for change cooperatively and compassionately.Footnote ³³ Dewey raised the expectations for peace by calling upon educators “to provide alternatives to the status quo in personal and social relations, in the conduct of economic and political affairs, and in the nature of international affairs.”Footnote ³⁴

In tracing the history of peace education in the United States, the work of Dewey remains central to peace educators who followed and subsequently expanded upon his original, albeit limited, thoughts on the subject. A fair criticism of Dewey by present-day peace educators is that he never developed or offered any effective teaching strategies for promoting international peace through schools. His views were limited to social studies courses—history and geography, in particular—in relationship to the problem of nationalism as a cause of war. Dewey's importance was in calling attention to the problem of war and the need for schools to address it as a byproduct of nationalistic intolerance. While he mentioned terms such as democratic cooperation, moral awareness, and critical thinking as aspects for peaceful behavior, he never developed a lesson plan for educators to implement in the classroom. How to build a culture of peace and patterns of cooperative behavior through schools would ultimately be left to his successors to figure out.

Nevertheless, the key concept of developing ways to teach peace, not just talk about it, derives directly from Dewey's progressive experimental ideas related to curriculum and pedagogical practices based on his understanding of democracy. According to education scholars Susan Semel and Alan Sadovnik, “Dewey proposed that children learn both individually and in groups. He believed that children should start their mode of inquiry by posing questions about what they want to know. This particular pedagogical strategy was referred to as problem solving or inquiry method.”Footnote ³⁵ As such, war and peace are examples of inquiry-based topics of discussion that students should be encouraged to generate as they seek to learn about their world.

The Deweyan model became the basis for developing current practices in peace education and peace studies programs. Exploring ways of settling conflicts domestically and internationally are at the heart of these programs. Stomfay-Stitz has pointed out that “Many fine models of peace education are being carried out in individual classrooms and schools across America,” relying on Dewey's progressive child-centered learning. “Examples,” she adds, “include (1) Robert Muller Schools; (2) Montessori schools; and (3) the integration of conflict resolution and peer mediation in numerous public schools nationwide. Robert Muller was a former Assistant Secretary-General to the United Nations, for instance, and his World Core Curriculum prepared students to become ‘cooperative planetary citizens,’ preparing them for life in a ‘global village.’” She also notes that “The well-known Montessori model … emphasize concern for children as the cornerstone of peace education.”Footnote ³⁶

But perhaps the view of educator Moses Chikwe best captures Dewey's legacy in peace education. In “Civic Education and Global Citizenship: A Deweyan Perspective,” Chikwe maintains that “civic education does hold the promise of expanding the narrow goal of traditional citizenship to the global perspective, due to the organized capacity of civic education and schooling in general in communicating the civic ideals.” The relevancy of Dewey's work is in respect to his “articulation of the public.” For Chikwe, Dewey's present-day contribution would be in helping educators expand “the traditional notion and understanding of civic education which is nationalistic in orientation to the more globalized understanding.” Dewey's rationale for establishing schools was “to well educate every member of the society for the success of democracy.” In terms of peace education, Chikwe continues, schools are laboratories and microcosms of society with multiple opportunities for human interaction and community building. This notion of communal interaction, which Dewey addressed in The Public and Its Problems, fits nicely into Chikwe's call for rethinking “the meaning of citizenship through civic education.”Footnote ³⁷ Peace educators are constantly drawing upon Dewey's theories for inspiration and direction in their own work, Chikwe fittingly concludes,

Despite the many efforts of peace educators like Chikwe, the world is still beset by violent conflict. Is education really the answer to this dilemma as Dewey suggested, or must governments continue to rely on the doctrine of peace through military strength? Ultimately, in terms of assessing Dewey's contribution to peace education thought, as seen through the twenty-first-century lens, and 100 years after writing Democracy and Education, it is necessary to consider what he said about the generic meaning of nationalism in the aftermath of World War I and the obligation teachers must uphold as to how to address it in terms of “cooperative human pursuits” absent “geographical limitations.”Footnote ³⁹ No one knew better than Dewey that the nationalistic furor of the war period had turned schools into “seminaries of patriotism” and that it caused many educators to question their given role as moral and social agents of compassion and understanding. The issue of unquestioned national allegiance and conformity—or some may say indoctrination—still remains the most significant obstacle to peace.

Therein is the central dilemma, which Dewey knew all too well, regarding the effectiveness of peace education, particularly through the medium of public schooling. The basic problem he encountered during World War I still remains so today. Whether during wartime or not, state education regulations have a “tremendous influence on what is taught in the classroom.” Despite a growing emphasis to promote global studies in social studies classrooms, for example, “A variety of institutional mechanisms ensure that history is taught in ways that support the status quo and socialize students into accepting the dominant political, economic, and social realities.” As Christopher Leahy points out in Whitewashing War, “State curriculum guides, standardized tests, and corporate textbooks, not only regulate what is and is not taught, but also the perspective from which history is taught, the pace of instruction, instructional methods, and, ultimately, determine what counts as historical knowledge.” More specifically, he adds, that “Textbooks and curricular materials draw upon war as a major frame of reference, marking progress toward an abstract, and perhaps unrealizable, democratic ideal. Traditional history treats the U.S. war on Native Americans, the Revolutionary, Civil, and World Wars, as a series of triumphs, each bringing the nation one step closer to greatness.” Equally important, and what Dewey tried to address but remains unchanged, is that “Lost from textbook narratives and curricular objectives are the demands that war makes on our democratic institutions, its costs in both blood and treasure, and the myriad stories of Americans who struggle to limit war through nonviolent alternatives.”Footnote ⁴⁰

Furthermore, the noted peace educators Ian Harris and Mary Lee Morrison have pointed out that “Critics of our global educational system maintain that often countries use schools to perpetuate nationalistic ideologies, including extolling the valor of war. … These critics believe that schools pass on militaristic values emphasizing competition and rituals of patriotism (an example is the almost universal practice of reciting the Pledge of Allegiance to the American flag). … In the face of such traditions, peace educators [are attempting] to teach in ways that will work toward the establishment of conditions for a less violent world. [But] cultural barriers and norms … challenge their activities.”Footnote ⁴¹ State laws placing restrictions on public school teachers’ freedom of thought, moreover, resides in the very concept of a “captive audience.”Footnote ⁴² Ironically, it was World War I that would spur legislative enactments of teacher loyalty oaths: a reality Dewey was unable to prevent.

Equally important, Dewey's outlook on world peace was based upon educating the public to reconsider its long-standing view of national sovereignty as a self-serving instrument for supremacy. The kind of nationalism he called for was one that respected peoples and cultures throughout the world—one favoring a cosmopolitan, not philistine, approach to global understanding. These aims were and still are admirable.Footnote ⁴³ Although Dewey's philosophy effectively developed the theoretical issue, it did not construct a concrete peace education program or the momentum to establish it permanently in schools. As philosopher Morton White aptly observed, “There are … two Deweys. There is the Dewey who revolted against formalism and who feared the consequences of setting up inalienable rights and self-evident principles for political and moral action. Then there is the Dewey who wanted to be a social engineer but did not succeed.” The problem lay with the first Dewey, “the Dewey who inveighed against panaceas, programs, and fixed ends.”Footnote ⁴⁴

In addition, Dewey made many statements in his most famous work and readers are still yearning for further elaboration. In this case one should ask, what defines the “working disposition of the mind” necessary for establishing peace? What exactly “binds people together in cooperative pursuits … apart from geographical limitations”? How can education change the “provisional character of national sovereignty”? Dewey was absolutely right in bringing these questions to readers’ attention. But his lack of guidance on how to fulfill his wishes for fear of creating fixed ends left room for a variety of interpretations depending on how one defines disposition of mind, cooperative pursuits, and provisional character. Dewey never completely addressed how a democratic community of inquiry would finally determine the capability of peace for protecting national sovereignty as “a working disposition of the mind” without actually jeopardizing it.

Yet, this is where current peace educators have taken Dewey's observations a step further. Whatever limitations Dewey's peace education views entailed, current practitioners have revised them and offered up their own expanded analyses. According to Harris and Morrison, for example, “John Dewey noted that ‘all education which develops power to share effectively in social life is moral.’ By confronting real life situations which cause and perpetuate violence in human communities, peace education allows students to study in-depth social problems and their concomitant values.” Extending Dewey's limited approach in terms of history and geography as a pathway for international friendship, current peace educators are encouraging students “to research political decisions such as the dropping of the first atomic bomb, the bombing of Dresden during World War II, or the escalation of the arms race” as a means for “delving deeply into human nature and the type of social organizations that support militarism.”Footnote ⁴⁵

Betty Reardon of Teachers College, moreover, in her popular work Comprehensive Peace Education, challenged the so-called academic validity of separating theory from practice by developing one pedagogical model emphasizing the concepts of planetary stewardship, global citizenship, and humane relationships. To that end, peace education has become a means for the “development of an authentic planetary consciousness that will enable us to transform the present human conditions by changing social [and political] structures and patterns of thought that have created it.”Footnote ⁴⁶

Additionally, perhaps the best example of expanding Dewey's concept of “learning by doing” is the peace curriculum developed by Prutzman, The Friendly Classroom for a Small Planet. Designed primarily for elementary school learners, it contains student exercises related to mediation and conflict resolution, gender appreciation, societal issues, the environment, and race.Footnote ⁴⁷ It is specifically designed to seek alternative ways to violence through problem solving.

Finally, how can Dewey's “democracy” as the instrument for peace reach fulfillment? Does education have a place despite political and legal requirements for allegiance to the state? In certain respects, Dewey's views were an extension of Immanuel Kant's conception of democratic peace as espoused in his late eighteenth-century work, Perpetual Peace. Dewey readily agreed with Kant that democracies are well disposed to promoting peace based on the principle of “democratic restraint.” Empowering citizens to select their own leaders and influence their nation's policies in the realm of foreign affairs was critical to achieving peace. Democracy allows people to make choices, including demanding peace, and that is why democracy as a “means” of choice can be the most effective way for preventing government's desire to wage war. But even Dewey admitted in The Public and Its Problems that “the cure for the ailments of democracy is more democracy. The prime difficulty … is that of discovering the means by which a scattered, mobile and manifold public may so recognize itself as to define and express its interests. This discovery is necessarily precedent to any fundamental change in the machinery.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Mobilizing a democratic society in times of war has been far more effective than sustaining a “perpetual peace” as Kant suggested. This is where peace education faces its greatest challenge.

Nevertheless, as Curti points out, it was the esteemed philosopher who “deplored the tendency to insist on nation-wide conformity to conventional ideas of national loyalty and patriotism.” Schools had the potential to promote a healthier brand of nationalism through educational awareness; it was up to teachers to replace the negative elements of “fear, compulsion, and violence,” which “breed bitter hatreds,” with hope, respect, and understanding.Footnote ⁴⁹ Dewey's insistence that democracy's foundation is based upon an “ardent faith in human existence” is the reason why educators remain committed to fulfilling his goal of promoting peace education in schools as the instrument for “developing a social consciousness and social ideals in children.”Footnote ⁵⁰