Many people and institutions are culpable with regard to the poor quality of K-12 education in the United States, very much including the incarnation of that beast in Minneapolis, Minnesota. For conditions are the same in central school districts across the nation, especially those serving students living at the urban core.
Among those culpable are the following institutions and people:
1) Universities >>>>> Departments, colleges, and schools of education are cash cows for institutions of would-be higher learning. Many folk campus-wide know that education professors are academic light-weights rendering atrocious teacher training to prospective teachers. But no one raises a voice for a multiplicity of reasons.
These reasons include the financial boon to the university for the tuition paid by students who are effectively buying their certification--- and, in application of salt to the wound, then buy advanced degrees in education unworthy of the appellations, “master’s” and “doctorates.” The latter not only secure pathways to higher pay in the degraded “step and lane” system, they also give the needed professional boost to those aspiring to administrative positions.
Also, university professors are smugly hypocritical with regard to K-12 education and the teachers who dwell therein. Most university professors do not have very clear notions of what constitutes an excellent education broadly construed, so they’re in a poor position to weigh in on pertinent matters. Yet they regard themselves as superior to those they obnoxiously dub, “schoolteachers.” Having a low level of understanding that knowledge, imparted for broad and deep internalization, is the essence of education--- university professors frequently sign off on the shibboleths of “critical thinking” and “lifelong learning.”
These same professorial hypocrites nevertheless love to rail about how students arrive to them math-deprived, reading-challenged, writing-deficient, and ignorant of all manner of subjects.
With regard to K-12 matters, there is hypocrisy and false hubris everywhere one turns in university departments and offices.
2) Churches and do-gooders
Churches collect a lot of money from church-folk, but very little of it goes to address the deepest needs of our own society. A lot it goes to church administration and then to select missionary efforts and to hot-topic international relief efforts. I am perpetually attune to the labor and funding that can be generated when hurricanes or famine strike far, far away--- but so little is done for needy people who may live either down the street or just a few feet away as the bird flies (say, across the Walker Art Museum from Lowry Hill, toward North Minneapolis).
And inasmuch as the overhaul of K-12 education is the paramount societal imperative of our time, church-folk give bare smidgeons of money and elbow grease to any activity that would ever produce the necessary transformation.
3) Politicians and the citizens who elect them
Politicians time after time use education issues to promote their own career aspirations.
But Democrats are bought and paid for by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) or the National Education Association (NEA)--- affiliations combined in Minnesota as Education Minnesota.
And Republicans are wildly inconsistent and chronically confused--- at one stage, for example, presenting themselves as supporters of No Child Left Behind and tough standards, then turning on that very program with the assertion of intrusive government.
And citizens clearly are variously selfish and muddled in their own views. Abused themselves in most instances by horrid public schools, they themselves are ill-educated and in no position to offer any instructive counsel on K-12 education. Yet these same citizens will weigh in on matters particularly pertinent to their own children, or arrogate to themselves an ability to run charter schools that they do not have.
Culpability for the atrocity that is K-12 education in Minnesota and in the United States is multiple.
If you are genuinely concerned about K-12 education and are seeking to find the source of its difficulty, take another look in that mirror.
Aug 11, 2015
Aug 7, 2015
For the Face of the K-12 Revolution, You Must Look in the Mirror
I have come in painful steps toward the most definite conclusion that there is no existing entity outside myself that can lead the way toward the complete overhaul of K-12 education that we need.
I have as my first responsibility superintending all aspects--- including teaching--- of the New Salem Educational Initiative, a program of total academic support for students living at the urban core of Minneapolis. My program now includes 125 students and family members receiving teaching, mentoring, resource referrals, and many other items of my personal attention. I teach seven days a week, conducting small-group academic sessions (three to five students per group, with a few two-hour slots set aside for just one student). I instruct students of all ages, from Grade K (kindergarten) through Grade 12, and now continue mentoring and academic instruction to those students who have graduated from high school and are matriculating at colleges and universities. I also have several adults in the program, mostly parents of students seeking to burnish and boost their English language skills or get the K-12 education that they never really received so that they can improve their career position or go on to college. That would all be quite enough, so I’d be most grateful if someone else would lead the effort to overhaul K-12 education.
But I have discovered the following:
>>>>> Michelle Rhee (former Chancellor of the Washington, D. C., public schools and now heading StudentsFirst) cannot lead the overhaul. She is more comfortable sporting those foot-damaging high heels, overlaid with that cosmetic fraud dubbed “make-up,” sitting with would-be or actual powerbrokers in big-shot settings, than she is going into the trenches where real education change must happen. Rhee closed down the Minnesota chapter of Students First and her Minnesota point person (Kathy Saltzman) has been very quiet ever since.
Elsewhere >>>>>
>>>>> Joe Nathan has been directing the Center for School Change for about 20 years. He is primarily an advocate for ineffectual charter schools--- and very little has changed for the better.
>>>>> Daniel Sellars at MinnCAN claims great shakes for his organization, but it works at the state capital level for the most part, much in the manner of StudentsFirst. Anytime there is any sort of legislation that can be construed to move the education reform effort forward, MinnCAN claims the same credit that Students First and other such organizations claim.
These organizations accomplish very little from the tower, never going into the trenches, trying to change K-12 education through legislation, rather than by pressuring systems as they exist to do what they should be doing.
>>>>> There are a number of gadflies on the education change scene who sing the same tired songs in slightly different verses time after time.
>>> Ted Kolderie sings the song of innovation, with very little specificity.
>>> Dane Smith recently seemed to audition for the Kolderie chorus.
>>> Mitch Pearlstein (head of the Center of the American Experiment [not just for the experiment, mind you, but at the very center of the experiment] in Minneapolis) considers himself an “education guy” on the strength of a degree that bears the word, “education.” But the guy has only one, really bad, idea: “We must fix the family first.” (This reminds me of Henry Kissinger, who fooled legions of politicos with his mysteriously lingering German accent, and one idea: balance of power, a la the Austrian Prince Metternich at the Congress of Vienna [1814-1815].) And Pearlstein’s single idea is absurd, because in fact we must first overhaul K-12 education so that familial cycles of poverty end and historically abused families may heal.
>>> R. T. Rybak spent 12 years as mayor, then said effectively, “Oh, wow, I should have been doing more about K-12 education,” then settled into a cushy job at Generation Next, which thus far has supposedly done studies about the K-12 dilemma and offered a few ideas related to early childhood education and the importance of reading in the early grades--- as if we really needed a lot of research to understand that one.
And that really homes in on the main point. We don’t need a whole bunch of new research to know what to do in conducting the K-12 revolution. We need instead applications of logic and elbow grease to accomplish the following:
We need to set about defining a rich, highly sequenced, grade-by grade K-12 curriculum in the liberal and technical arts.
And we need to train the teachers capable of imparting that curriculum, because our wretched departments, colleges, and schools of education can never do so.
So I have set about pressuring the Minneapolis Public Schools to do these things, by launching a new academic journal (Journal of the K-12 Revolution: Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota); premiering a new television show (The K-12 Revolution with Dr. Gary Marvin Davison, televised Wednesdays at 6:00 PM on Channel 17 or streaming in real time on the MTN [Minneapolis Telecommunications Network] and found also at Holy4Grace, YouTube), and speaking frequently at public venues, including the monthly meetings of the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education.
I am also five chapters into the writing of my ninth book, Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education, to enable me to deliver with ever greater efficiency to my students in their two hours per week with me the education that they are not receiving during their 30-35 hours or so in their regular schools of attendance.
I am doing these things, in addition to teaching 17 two-hour academic sessions over the course of a seven-day week, because no one else is advocating for the needed changes in K-12 education. The situation became a matter of, “If not me, who? If not now, when?”
So know that if you really want to change K-12 education, you cannot count on the numerous gadflies flitting about the real issues:
You can support my efforts (I am not hard to find in this technologically route-laden age), or you can start to make something like the time commitment that I make by starting your own street-level, in-the-meetings-and-at-the-venues approach that I have adopted.
Either way, you must look in the mirror and know that when it comes to change in K-12 education, you are both the problem and the potential solution.
No more studies---
Just logic and elbow grease---
You yourselves must get to work to revolutionize K-12 education, overturn the injustice of history, and make a better world for young people and families who have been waiting for decades and even centuries for the change that must come.
I have as my first responsibility superintending all aspects--- including teaching--- of the New Salem Educational Initiative, a program of total academic support for students living at the urban core of Minneapolis. My program now includes 125 students and family members receiving teaching, mentoring, resource referrals, and many other items of my personal attention. I teach seven days a week, conducting small-group academic sessions (three to five students per group, with a few two-hour slots set aside for just one student). I instruct students of all ages, from Grade K (kindergarten) through Grade 12, and now continue mentoring and academic instruction to those students who have graduated from high school and are matriculating at colleges and universities. I also have several adults in the program, mostly parents of students seeking to burnish and boost their English language skills or get the K-12 education that they never really received so that they can improve their career position or go on to college. That would all be quite enough, so I’d be most grateful if someone else would lead the effort to overhaul K-12 education.
But I have discovered the following:
>>>>> Michelle Rhee (former Chancellor of the Washington, D. C., public schools and now heading StudentsFirst) cannot lead the overhaul. She is more comfortable sporting those foot-damaging high heels, overlaid with that cosmetic fraud dubbed “make-up,” sitting with would-be or actual powerbrokers in big-shot settings, than she is going into the trenches where real education change must happen. Rhee closed down the Minnesota chapter of Students First and her Minnesota point person (Kathy Saltzman) has been very quiet ever since.
Elsewhere >>>>>
>>>>> Joe Nathan has been directing the Center for School Change for about 20 years. He is primarily an advocate for ineffectual charter schools--- and very little has changed for the better.
>>>>> Daniel Sellars at MinnCAN claims great shakes for his organization, but it works at the state capital level for the most part, much in the manner of StudentsFirst. Anytime there is any sort of legislation that can be construed to move the education reform effort forward, MinnCAN claims the same credit that Students First and other such organizations claim.
These organizations accomplish very little from the tower, never going into the trenches, trying to change K-12 education through legislation, rather than by pressuring systems as they exist to do what they should be doing.
>>>>> There are a number of gadflies on the education change scene who sing the same tired songs in slightly different verses time after time.
>>> Ted Kolderie sings the song of innovation, with very little specificity.
>>> Dane Smith recently seemed to audition for the Kolderie chorus.
>>> Mitch Pearlstein (head of the Center of the American Experiment [not just for the experiment, mind you, but at the very center of the experiment] in Minneapolis) considers himself an “education guy” on the strength of a degree that bears the word, “education.” But the guy has only one, really bad, idea: “We must fix the family first.” (This reminds me of Henry Kissinger, who fooled legions of politicos with his mysteriously lingering German accent, and one idea: balance of power, a la the Austrian Prince Metternich at the Congress of Vienna [1814-1815].) And Pearlstein’s single idea is absurd, because in fact we must first overhaul K-12 education so that familial cycles of poverty end and historically abused families may heal.
>>> R. T. Rybak spent 12 years as mayor, then said effectively, “Oh, wow, I should have been doing more about K-12 education,” then settled into a cushy job at Generation Next, which thus far has supposedly done studies about the K-12 dilemma and offered a few ideas related to early childhood education and the importance of reading in the early grades--- as if we really needed a lot of research to understand that one.
And that really homes in on the main point. We don’t need a whole bunch of new research to know what to do in conducting the K-12 revolution. We need instead applications of logic and elbow grease to accomplish the following:
We need to set about defining a rich, highly sequenced, grade-by grade K-12 curriculum in the liberal and technical arts.
And we need to train the teachers capable of imparting that curriculum, because our wretched departments, colleges, and schools of education can never do so.
So I have set about pressuring the Minneapolis Public Schools to do these things, by launching a new academic journal (Journal of the K-12 Revolution: Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota); premiering a new television show (The K-12 Revolution with Dr. Gary Marvin Davison, televised Wednesdays at 6:00 PM on Channel 17 or streaming in real time on the MTN [Minneapolis Telecommunications Network] and found also at Holy4Grace, YouTube), and speaking frequently at public venues, including the monthly meetings of the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education.
I am also five chapters into the writing of my ninth book, Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education, to enable me to deliver with ever greater efficiency to my students in their two hours per week with me the education that they are not receiving during their 30-35 hours or so in their regular schools of attendance.
I am doing these things, in addition to teaching 17 two-hour academic sessions over the course of a seven-day week, because no one else is advocating for the needed changes in K-12 education. The situation became a matter of, “If not me, who? If not now, when?”
So know that if you really want to change K-12 education, you cannot count on the numerous gadflies flitting about the real issues:
You can support my efforts (I am not hard to find in this technologically route-laden age), or you can start to make something like the time commitment that I make by starting your own street-level, in-the-meetings-and-at-the-venues approach that I have adopted.
Either way, you must look in the mirror and know that when it comes to change in K-12 education, you are both the problem and the potential solution.
No more studies---
Just logic and elbow grease---
You yourselves must get to work to revolutionize K-12 education, overturn the injustice of history, and make a better world for young people and families who have been waiting for decades and even centuries for the change that must come.
Aug 3, 2015
The Immature Provincialism of Dane Smith
As if channeling Ted Kolderie, Dane Smith gave us another muddled and provincial presentation of opinion in the Sunday, 2 August 2015, edition of the Star Tribune.
Smith cites several “educational partnership groups” working with the education establishment to improve K-12 education. These groups include the Itaska Area Initiative for Student Success, Partnership for Student Success (St. Cloud and Sauk Rapids), Northfield Promise, Promise Neighborhoods (Northside Minneapolis and St. Paul), Generation Next (Minneapolis and St. Paul), and Every Hand Joined (Red Wing). He’s all excited about and makes excessive claims for the potential of these unproven and nascent groups--- the existence of which play into Smith’s false assumptions about “ordinary people” at the local level being the best sources for ideas on educational improvement--- offering routes to success for the students within their spheres of action.
Smith is also energized by an Aspen Ideas Festival appearance by author (Bowling Alone [2000]; Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis [2015]) Robert Putnam, at which the latter perpetuated the myth that great education movements typically don’t flow from Washington, D. C.
So Dane Smith is animated by the usual errors typically emanating from most of our Twin Cities pontificators and promulgators on K-12 education issues:
There have been few great education movements of any sort in the United States, so no source--- local or federal--- has been all that seminally insightful. The few decent and socially responsible ideas that we have had in this nation have emanated from a mix of individual, local, and federal sources, but have all required at least the legislative approval and the budgetary backing of the federal government. Such legislation has resulted in our K-12 schools having greater accessibility and equity across lines of ethnicity, economic status, and gender.
But neither local nor federal initiative has done much to make of K-12 schools in the United States effective institutions for the delivery of an excellent education. The best school systems in the world, revealed by such international rankings as PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment), are highly centralized at the national level, with curriculum well-defined across both the liberal and vocational arts, and with teacher qualifications rigorously detailed for reference by teacher training programs across each nation. These best public education systems tend to be situated in East Asia (South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore [located in Southeast Asia but fundamentally a Chinese-led society]) and northern Europe (Germany and the Scandinavian nations (of most recent note, Finland]).
Hence, the assertion that the best ideas bubble up from local communities inhabited by “ordinary people” is nonsense. This is no more true for education than it is for health care, another area of human service toward which the United States is engaged in a comparative crawl toward the sort of universal systems that work best for the most people across the globe. People in the United States are so inured with the illusions of rugged individualism and local control that they fail to observe that the fairest and most equitable governments in the world are those that are either of the democratic socialist type or those that have a history of central government involvement and have in contemporary times borrowed intelligently from the social democracies.
The problem with the Dane Smith and Ted Kolderie types is that they are reticent to be adults capable of emerging from their provincial perspectives.
Young people deserve instead to have adults making decisions about K-12 education who are willing to say, “This is what all of you need to know about mathematics, natural science (biology, chemistry, physics), history, government, economics, literature, and the fine (visual and musical) arts.”
And they deserve to have well-informed people making key decisions affecting their lives who actually understand the best systems for health care and educational delivery from an international perspective--- people willing to assert themselves as adults. Mature internationalists making decisions that affect our precious young people have an obligation to convey the clear message that well-informed citizens must have training in shared knowledge and skill sets in order to be culturally enriched, civically prepared, and professionally satisfied to live life to the fullest in this one earthly sojourn--- regardless of original economic and geographic circumstances at birth.
Inasmuch as many high-profile people in our society dwell in fame that far exceeds the significance of their deeds, I do not make the distinction that the shallow-thinking Dane Smith makes between “ordinary people” and those presumably less “ordinary.” I revere most, rather, those of low profile who transform the world for the better every day their feet hit the ground. It will be these people, rather than the Dane Smiths and the Ted Kolderies of this world, who will eventually apply the elbow grease necessary to revolutionize central school districts such as the Minneapolis Public Schools.
Courageous activists will be forced to start at this level because they live in a nation in which the promise of “local control” is proven false by the weighty achievements of students in the best public education systems in the world, located in highly centralized social democracies. Using the central school system as a surrogate for the central government, extraordinary low-profile education activists will aim toward the ultimate goal of inaugurating nation-wide curriculum and standards for teacher training.
In so doing, these low-profile change-makers will reveal in their efforts a maturity and worldliness in the best interests of the young people whose futures are their adult responsibility. The rising generation of citizens is awaiting genuine rather than merely chronological adults capable of showing them the way toward an education of excellence--- an education capable of giving them the lives of cultural enrichment, civic preparation, and professional satisfaction that they deserve in this one earthly sojourn.
Smith cites several “educational partnership groups” working with the education establishment to improve K-12 education. These groups include the Itaska Area Initiative for Student Success, Partnership for Student Success (St. Cloud and Sauk Rapids), Northfield Promise, Promise Neighborhoods (Northside Minneapolis and St. Paul), Generation Next (Minneapolis and St. Paul), and Every Hand Joined (Red Wing). He’s all excited about and makes excessive claims for the potential of these unproven and nascent groups--- the existence of which play into Smith’s false assumptions about “ordinary people” at the local level being the best sources for ideas on educational improvement--- offering routes to success for the students within their spheres of action.
Smith is also energized by an Aspen Ideas Festival appearance by author (Bowling Alone [2000]; Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis [2015]) Robert Putnam, at which the latter perpetuated the myth that great education movements typically don’t flow from Washington, D. C.
So Dane Smith is animated by the usual errors typically emanating from most of our Twin Cities pontificators and promulgators on K-12 education issues:
There have been few great education movements of any sort in the United States, so no source--- local or federal--- has been all that seminally insightful. The few decent and socially responsible ideas that we have had in this nation have emanated from a mix of individual, local, and federal sources, but have all required at least the legislative approval and the budgetary backing of the federal government. Such legislation has resulted in our K-12 schools having greater accessibility and equity across lines of ethnicity, economic status, and gender.
But neither local nor federal initiative has done much to make of K-12 schools in the United States effective institutions for the delivery of an excellent education. The best school systems in the world, revealed by such international rankings as PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment), are highly centralized at the national level, with curriculum well-defined across both the liberal and vocational arts, and with teacher qualifications rigorously detailed for reference by teacher training programs across each nation. These best public education systems tend to be situated in East Asia (South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore [located in Southeast Asia but fundamentally a Chinese-led society]) and northern Europe (Germany and the Scandinavian nations (of most recent note, Finland]).
Hence, the assertion that the best ideas bubble up from local communities inhabited by “ordinary people” is nonsense. This is no more true for education than it is for health care, another area of human service toward which the United States is engaged in a comparative crawl toward the sort of universal systems that work best for the most people across the globe. People in the United States are so inured with the illusions of rugged individualism and local control that they fail to observe that the fairest and most equitable governments in the world are those that are either of the democratic socialist type or those that have a history of central government involvement and have in contemporary times borrowed intelligently from the social democracies.
The problem with the Dane Smith and Ted Kolderie types is that they are reticent to be adults capable of emerging from their provincial perspectives.
Young people deserve instead to have adults making decisions about K-12 education who are willing to say, “This is what all of you need to know about mathematics, natural science (biology, chemistry, physics), history, government, economics, literature, and the fine (visual and musical) arts.”
And they deserve to have well-informed people making key decisions affecting their lives who actually understand the best systems for health care and educational delivery from an international perspective--- people willing to assert themselves as adults. Mature internationalists making decisions that affect our precious young people have an obligation to convey the clear message that well-informed citizens must have training in shared knowledge and skill sets in order to be culturally enriched, civically prepared, and professionally satisfied to live life to the fullest in this one earthly sojourn--- regardless of original economic and geographic circumstances at birth.
Inasmuch as many high-profile people in our society dwell in fame that far exceeds the significance of their deeds, I do not make the distinction that the shallow-thinking Dane Smith makes between “ordinary people” and those presumably less “ordinary.” I revere most, rather, those of low profile who transform the world for the better every day their feet hit the ground. It will be these people, rather than the Dane Smiths and the Ted Kolderies of this world, who will eventually apply the elbow grease necessary to revolutionize central school districts such as the Minneapolis Public Schools.
Courageous activists will be forced to start at this level because they live in a nation in which the promise of “local control” is proven false by the weighty achievements of students in the best public education systems in the world, located in highly centralized social democracies. Using the central school system as a surrogate for the central government, extraordinary low-profile education activists will aim toward the ultimate goal of inaugurating nation-wide curriculum and standards for teacher training.
In so doing, these low-profile change-makers will reveal in their efforts a maturity and worldliness in the best interests of the young people whose futures are their adult responsibility. The rising generation of citizens is awaiting genuine rather than merely chronological adults capable of showing them the way toward an education of excellence--- an education capable of giving them the lives of cultural enrichment, civic preparation, and professional satisfaction that they deserve in this one earthly sojourn.
Jul 30, 2015
Introductory Comments: Series on Writing a Research Paper, with Detailed Statement of Assignment, Model Research Paper, and Vocabulary Accumulated in Conducting the Research
I typically find that my students have never been required to do a genuine research paper, in which they must use some form of accepted citations. For such a paper, a bibliography listing sources is not sufficient. A research paper is considered plagiarized if information for the exact source material is not specifically given, including not only author, and title of the book or journal, but also chapter or article name and pages on which the precise information may be found.
The three forms of citation now accepted for scholarly publication are footnotes, endnotes, and internal citations. Footnotes and endnotes are identical in form, with placement either at the bottom of the page on which the reference is used (for footnotes) or all references given in numbered order of appearance at the end of the article or chapter (for endnotes) constituting the only difference. Internal citations typically give only author, title of work (only if more than one book is used for a single author), and page numbers in parentheses immediately following the pertinent material used, with full information as to publisher, date, and page numbers given in a “Bibliography,” “References,” or “Works Cited” list at the end of the research paper.
I prefer the endnote format, and this is the one that I use in the model research paper that I present in this series focused on writing a research paper.
What follows in successive sections are instructions to students for writing a research paper on the comparative virtues of nonviolence or violence as means for achieving social change; a model research paper on that topic; and a vocabulary list that I derived from reading of the source material and the vocabulary used in my own paper. This vocabulary list is one of many that I have compiled for explicit vocabulary instruction to my students.
This series on writing a research paper is very important for exposing the slim cognitive abilities of those in the education establishment and their debased notions of the components of K-12 education.
The education establishment--- led by education professors and then including central school district administrators, building principals, and teachers who have been trained in departments, schools, and colleges of education --- devalues knowledge:
Education professors instruct their students that specific knowledge sets may always be accessed in numerous available sources: traditional books and journals, online versions of these, and websites. They maintain that students need not learn specific subject area material, particularly before high school; throughout most of their K-12 years, factual knowledge is not as important as the matters of “critical thinking” and “lifelong learning.”
Such reasoning emanates from the least respected professorial contingent on college and university campuses, education professors who are themselves short on knowledge. How convenient for them, then, to argue that knowledge is not important. Released from the need to give their future teachers and administrators much in the way of information, they feel free to stress critical thinking and lifelong learning as the goals for education.
This is a sham and a grave injustice to our K-12 students, the reason that they now move across stages at graduation time to claim pieces of paper that are diplomas in name only, and the explanation for why the adult public in the United States is so woefully short on knowledge in the realms of mathematics, natural science, history, government, economics, literature, and the fine arts.
In the absence of true knowledge, students move through school guided by teachers who claim to be teaching critical thinking skills and instilling lifelong learning--- but do neither. One cannot reason critically in the absence of substantial accumulated knowledge about the subjects considered for critical assessment. Nor can one gain much enthusiasm for a lifetime of learning when she or he has learned so little during their years in school.
What I have presented in this series of articles is a research paper assignment of the type that truly requires students to engage in critical analysis. They are asked to consider seriously the arguments of those who favor and those who disfavor violence as a means for social change--- and to decide where they themselves stand as to whether nonviolent means or violent means are most valid for the achievement of social change.
Before they write such a paper, they read lengthy articles and book chapters. And in the case of my own students in the New Salem Educational Initiative, they read these articles on the strength of a great amount of accumulated knowledge in the history of the United States, the particular history of African Americans, and a broad range of historical information pertinent to a world that included the British Empire and the colonial experience of that empire's largest possession--- India.
Witnessed in the presentation of the research paper, and the vocabulary list of terms accumulated in researching and making the presentation, is genuine critical thinking and respect for the processes of serious scholarship that engender enthusiasm for lifelong learning.
The reader of this series of articles will come to look past the slogans and shibboleths of the education establishment for an understanding of the excellent education that our children now await and will only have when we have thoroughly overhauled K-12 education into that knowledge-intensive endeavor that will give our young people lives of cultural enrichment, civic engagement, and professional satisfaction.
The three forms of citation now accepted for scholarly publication are footnotes, endnotes, and internal citations. Footnotes and endnotes are identical in form, with placement either at the bottom of the page on which the reference is used (for footnotes) or all references given in numbered order of appearance at the end of the article or chapter (for endnotes) constituting the only difference. Internal citations typically give only author, title of work (only if more than one book is used for a single author), and page numbers in parentheses immediately following the pertinent material used, with full information as to publisher, date, and page numbers given in a “Bibliography,” “References,” or “Works Cited” list at the end of the research paper.
I prefer the endnote format, and this is the one that I use in the model research paper that I present in this series focused on writing a research paper.
What follows in successive sections are instructions to students for writing a research paper on the comparative virtues of nonviolence or violence as means for achieving social change; a model research paper on that topic; and a vocabulary list that I derived from reading of the source material and the vocabulary used in my own paper. This vocabulary list is one of many that I have compiled for explicit vocabulary instruction to my students.
This series on writing a research paper is very important for exposing the slim cognitive abilities of those in the education establishment and their debased notions of the components of K-12 education.
The education establishment--- led by education professors and then including central school district administrators, building principals, and teachers who have been trained in departments, schools, and colleges of education --- devalues knowledge:
Education professors instruct their students that specific knowledge sets may always be accessed in numerous available sources: traditional books and journals, online versions of these, and websites. They maintain that students need not learn specific subject area material, particularly before high school; throughout most of their K-12 years, factual knowledge is not as important as the matters of “critical thinking” and “lifelong learning.”
Such reasoning emanates from the least respected professorial contingent on college and university campuses, education professors who are themselves short on knowledge. How convenient for them, then, to argue that knowledge is not important. Released from the need to give their future teachers and administrators much in the way of information, they feel free to stress critical thinking and lifelong learning as the goals for education.
This is a sham and a grave injustice to our K-12 students, the reason that they now move across stages at graduation time to claim pieces of paper that are diplomas in name only, and the explanation for why the adult public in the United States is so woefully short on knowledge in the realms of mathematics, natural science, history, government, economics, literature, and the fine arts.
In the absence of true knowledge, students move through school guided by teachers who claim to be teaching critical thinking skills and instilling lifelong learning--- but do neither. One cannot reason critically in the absence of substantial accumulated knowledge about the subjects considered for critical assessment. Nor can one gain much enthusiasm for a lifetime of learning when she or he has learned so little during their years in school.
What I have presented in this series of articles is a research paper assignment of the type that truly requires students to engage in critical analysis. They are asked to consider seriously the arguments of those who favor and those who disfavor violence as a means for social change--- and to decide where they themselves stand as to whether nonviolent means or violent means are most valid for the achievement of social change.
Before they write such a paper, they read lengthy articles and book chapters. And in the case of my own students in the New Salem Educational Initiative, they read these articles on the strength of a great amount of accumulated knowledge in the history of the United States, the particular history of African Americans, and a broad range of historical information pertinent to a world that included the British Empire and the colonial experience of that empire's largest possession--- India.
Witnessed in the presentation of the research paper, and the vocabulary list of terms accumulated in researching and making the presentation, is genuine critical thinking and respect for the processes of serious scholarship that engender enthusiasm for lifelong learning.
The reader of this series of articles will come to look past the slogans and shibboleths of the education establishment for an understanding of the excellent education that our children now await and will only have when we have thoroughly overhauled K-12 education into that knowledge-intensive endeavor that will give our young people lives of cultural enrichment, civic engagement, and professional satisfaction.
Research Paper Assignment: The Issue of Nonviolence versus Violence in Strategies for Social and Political Change
Research Paper Assignment: The Issue of Nonviolence versus Violence in Strategies for Social and Political Change
Prepared by Gary Marvin Davison, Ph. D.
Director, New Salem Educational Initiative
Please write a research paper of approximately five pages (typed, double-spaced) using the photocopied chapters and selected groups of pages that I have provided from the following sources:
Alex Ayres, ed. “Nonviolence,” in The Wisdom of Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Meridian/ Penguin, 1993), pp. 164-170.
Joan V. Bondurant, , Chapter II (Two), “Satyagraha: Its Basic Precepts” Conquest of Violence: The Gandhian Philosophy of Conflict (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1971), pp. 15-35.
Warren J. Halliburton, ed., Malcolm X, “Address to Mississippi Youth,” Historic Speeches of African Americans (New York: The African American Experience/ Franklin Watts, 1993), pp. 129-133.
Martin Luther King, Jr., Chapter VI (Six), “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence,” Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story (New York: Perennial/ Harper & Row, 1958), pp. 72-88.
TOPIC
Please read each of these selections.
After reading these four selections, compare Mohandas K. Gandhi’s ideas on satyagraha (using Bondurant’s Conquest of Violence) and Martin Luther King’s ideas on nonviolence (using the material from both the Ayres [The Wisdom of Martin Luther King, Jr.] and King [Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story] books). You should find these ideas highly compatible, since Martin Luther King based his ideas pertinent to nonviolence on Gandhi’s ideas concerning satyagraha; you should, however, also notice differences in terminology and emphases in the work of these two thinkers and activists. Point out both the many similarities in thought and the significant differences in terminology and emphasis that you observe in the work of Gandhi and Dr. King.
Then contrast what you observe in the work of Gandhi and King with the ideas expressed by Malcolm X in his “Address to Mississippi Youth.” Are there any similarities that you note in the Malcolm X speech by comparison with the Gandhi and Dr. King readings? What are the most notable differences?
Finally, if you were going to plan and lead a social movement, what combination of ideas would you be most likely to use? Answering this question will necessitate your deciding what you think about violent versus nonviolent approaches to social movements--- and which of the ideas about which you’ve read most appeal to you.
Your research paper should include an introductory paragraph with clearly stated thesis; and a concluding paragraph summarizing your most important points and making a final statement that will leave your readers thinking carefully about what you have written. There is no certain number of paragraphs required for this essay; just provide your analysis in the five or so pages, organizing and presenting your paragraphs so as to cover your answers and ideas in the most compelling way.
Use proper format for footnotes or endnotes to document your use of the source materials.
Prepared by Gary Marvin Davison, Ph. D.
Director, New Salem Educational Initiative
Please write a research paper of approximately five pages (typed, double-spaced) using the photocopied chapters and selected groups of pages that I have provided from the following sources:
Alex Ayres, ed. “Nonviolence,” in The Wisdom of Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Meridian/ Penguin, 1993), pp. 164-170.
Joan V. Bondurant, , Chapter II (Two), “Satyagraha: Its Basic Precepts” Conquest of Violence: The Gandhian Philosophy of Conflict (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1971), pp. 15-35.
Warren J. Halliburton, ed., Malcolm X, “Address to Mississippi Youth,” Historic Speeches of African Americans (New York: The African American Experience/ Franklin Watts, 1993), pp. 129-133.
Martin Luther King, Jr., Chapter VI (Six), “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence,” Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story (New York: Perennial/ Harper & Row, 1958), pp. 72-88.
TOPIC
Please read each of these selections.
After reading these four selections, compare Mohandas K. Gandhi’s ideas on satyagraha (using Bondurant’s Conquest of Violence) and Martin Luther King’s ideas on nonviolence (using the material from both the Ayres [The Wisdom of Martin Luther King, Jr.] and King [Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story] books). You should find these ideas highly compatible, since Martin Luther King based his ideas pertinent to nonviolence on Gandhi’s ideas concerning satyagraha; you should, however, also notice differences in terminology and emphases in the work of these two thinkers and activists. Point out both the many similarities in thought and the significant differences in terminology and emphasis that you observe in the work of Gandhi and Dr. King.
Then contrast what you observe in the work of Gandhi and King with the ideas expressed by Malcolm X in his “Address to Mississippi Youth.” Are there any similarities that you note in the Malcolm X speech by comparison with the Gandhi and Dr. King readings? What are the most notable differences?
Finally, if you were going to plan and lead a social movement, what combination of ideas would you be most likely to use? Answering this question will necessitate your deciding what you think about violent versus nonviolent approaches to social movements--- and which of the ideas about which you’ve read most appeal to you.
Your research paper should include an introductory paragraph with clearly stated thesis; and a concluding paragraph summarizing your most important points and making a final statement that will leave your readers thinking carefully about what you have written. There is no certain number of paragraphs required for this essay; just provide your analysis in the five or so pages, organizing and presenting your paragraphs so as to cover your answers and ideas in the most compelling way.
Use proper format for footnotes or endnotes to document your use of the source materials.
A Consideration of the Ideas of Mohandas K. Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X on the Issue of Nonviolence as Relevant to Social Movements
Model Research Paper
Gary Marvin Davison, Ph. D.
Director, New Salem Educational Initiative
With regard to the use of violence in promoting social change, the great leaders Mohandas K. Gandhi and Martin Luther King were in accord: Violence begets more violence and casts those in disagreement with one another as spiteful enemies rather than as opponents engaged in a test of ideas.
Malcolm X had a different view: Although rarely invoked in the immediacy of the moment as the preferred means of action, for Malcolm X violence was one of those options among “any means necessary” reserved for the achievement of goals consistent with the long-term best interests of humanity, especially that portion of humanity long denied fundamental rights of citizenship. In this paper I advance the view that a commitment to nonviolence is preferable to the use of violence for the achievement of political and social justice, for reasons cogently argued by both Gandhi and King. In advancing this thesis, I acknowledge the impact that Malcolm X had on the political events of his place and time; consistent with my thesis, I explain the difference between the immediate benefit of the threat of violence for the achievement of social and political ends, versus the enduring benefits of the commitment to nonviolence as the means to attainment of a more peaceful and loving future for humankind.
In Chapter II of her masterful Conquest of Violence (1), Joan Bondurant discusses the fundamental tenets of Mohandas K. Gandhi’s philosophy of satyagraha, through which he sought to overcome the might of the British Empire. Satya means “Truth.” Graha means “holding firmly.” The term, satyagraha, therefore, means “holding firmly to the Truth."(2)
Gandhi regarded the Truth to be so important as to be in identity with God. And rather than echo the phrasing of “God Is Love” with a similar, “God is Truth,” Gandhi underscored the divinity of Truth with the expression, “Truth is God.”
For Gandhi, Truth with a capital “T” is the first great principle of satyagraha for which humanity must strive.(3) All that human beings can ever know, Gandhi said, is truth with a lower case “t,” that truth as it appears to a mere human being at any given moment in time. Since a mere human being can never know for sure that she or he is correct about a matter in dispute, there is always the possibility that one’s opponent is right.
Ahimsa is the second major principle of satyagraha, the Sanskrit term that comes closest to the English term, “nonviolence.” But in Gandhi’s conception and in the best rendering of the term, ahimsa means more precisely, “refusing to do harm.”(4) If no individual can ever know that she or he is right, violence could never be justified and must be refused: Truth would be destroyed with an act of violence.(5)
Further, ahimsa is such an act of devotion toward the best interests of one’s opponent as to be synonymous with “love”:
I accept the interpretation of Ahimsa namely that it is not merely
a negative state of harmlessness but it is a positive state of love,
of doing good even to the evil-doer. But it does not mean helping
the evil-doer to continue to do wrong or tolerating it by passive
acquiescence. On the contrary, love, the active state of Ahimsa,
requires you to resist the wrong-doer.(6)
Gandhi’s reasoned commitment to nonviolence (ahimsa) gave rise to the third great principle of satyagraha: tapasya or “self-suffering."(7) With the willingness to undergo self-suffering as necessary, the nonviolent proponent of social change commits to a course of action that inflicts no violence but receives violence as necessary. The willingness to receive violence becomes a powerful expression of love for one’s opponent, against whom one struggles to convert rather than conquer.
Martin Luther King, in the sixth chapter of his book, Stride Toward Freedom(8), gives powerful testimony to just how highly he regarded Mohandas Gandhi’s formulation of nonviolence in satyagraha. Dr. King details how he read and appreciated, if he did not agree completely with, the ideas of many Western authors: Henry David Thoreau(9), Walter Rauschenbusch(10), Karl Marx(11), Friedrich Nietzsche(12), John Stuart Mill, Thomas Hobbes, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and Reinhold Niebuhr(13). But it was a lecture on the ideas of Mohandas K. Gandhi by Dr. Mordecai Johnson(14) that gave him his ideological framework for social action.
Dr. King identifies six aspects of Gandhi’s philosophy and program for action in satyagraha that are germane and inspiring for waging a social movement such as that for Civil Rights in the United States. First, he stresses that nonviolent resistance calls for courageous action, rather than passivity(15). Second, he emphasizes the appeal of converting the opponent to one’s viewpoint, rather than seeking to defeat one’s adversary(16). Third, he focuses on Gandhi’s emphasis on evil actions, rather than evil people(17). Fourth, he explains the need to endure suffering as additional proof of the courage that attends satyagraha, and stresses the sincerity that such sacrifice entails(18). Fifth, he finds appealing the Gandhian idea that thought, as well as action, is necessary in the commitment to nonviolence--- that one must seek to demonstrate internal, spiritual nonviolence, regarding harmful thoughts about one’s opponent to be as abhorrent as physical violence(19). Finally, Dr. King found enormously powerful Gandhi’s idea that the universe is on the side of justice, so that a commitment to satyagraha aligns one with the God who represents the ideal of just action in behalf of humankind.(20)
Dr. King found the Gandhian formulation of satyagraha to offer a commitment to the principles of universal love (agape) and sacrifice (as found most saliently in the Crucifixion) that follow the best inclinations of Christianity.(21)
In other works, Martin Luther King called upon the United States to turn away from the frontier tradition of violent retaliation(22), sought to promote nonviolence in all areas of human conflict (with implicit implementation on an international scale)(23), and made the case that nonviolence is paradoxically the most powerful of all weapons:
Nonviolence is a powerful and just weapon. It is unique in history,
which cuts without wounding, and ennobles the man who wields
it. It is a sword that heals (24).
Against this ethic of satyagraha advanced by both Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Malcolm X objected to nonviolence on the basis of what he saw as its irrational applications and its frequent situational ineffectiveness. In his “Address to Mississippi Youth,” Malcolm X tells an audience of thirty-seven adolescents,
My experience has been that in many instances where you
find Negroes talking about nonviolence… they mean they’re
nonviolent with somebody with else. They are nonviolent
with the enemy… a person can come out to your home, and
if he’s white and wants to heap some kind of brutality on you,
you’re nonviolent… but if another Negro just stomps his foot,
you’ll rumble with him in a minute… which shows you there’s
an inconsistency there.(25)
Malcolm X also raises the very real spectacle of vulnerability to white violence in the absence of armed resistance:
We of the Organization of African American Unitty are… with
the efforts to register our people to vote one thousand percent.
But we do not go along with anyone telling us to help nonviolently.
We think that… if some kind of Ku Klux Klan is going to put
[Negroes] in the river, and the government doesn’t do anything
about it, it’s time for us to organize and band together and equip
ourselves and qualify ourselves to protect ourselves. And when
you can protect yourself, you don’t have to worry about being hurt.(26)
Malcolm X states that he is not driven by hate. But he recoils from the ethic of universally applied love:
I don’t have hate in me. I have no hate at all. I have some sense. I’m not going to let someone who hates me tell me to love him.
I’m not that way out. And you, young as you are, you’re not
going to do it either. The only time you’re going to get in that
bag is if somebody puts you there. Somebody else, who doesn’t
have your welfare at heart.(28)
Any differences in the thought and action of Mohandas K. Gandhi and Martin Luther King are those of emphasis and lexicon. Martin Luther King studied in great detail the principles of satyagraha of Mohandas Gandhi and understood those principles in their original context. But he applied those principles as a Christian pastor, seeing them through the prism of agape, the Greek term for universal love that Christians came to identify with the Spirit moving in the life, activity, and teachings of Jesus. Martin Luther King credited Gandhi for demonstrably moving the guiding force of love from the level of individual interaction to the social sphere. Dr. King clearly stated that Gandhi was his inspiration for the application of the principles of satyagraha and ahimsa to the Civil Rights Movement in the American cultural and political context.
In the manner of these fellow agitators for social change, Malcolm X was a man of tremendous courage and commitment. He shared with them a passion for a better world, one in which all people are accorded their proper dignity, a world in which those who historically have been abused permanently gain the respect that they deserve.
Malcolm X differed fundamentally from Gandhi and King, though, as to matters of nonviolence, love, and effective action. Malcolm X regarded nonviolence as an inconsistently applied creed that African Americans resorted to meekly when faced with white oppression but disregarded in responses to each other. He stated explicitly that he harbored no hate but would not be told to love his enemies.
And he saw those enemies as the other, not the same in constitution as friends. He thought that violence tended to be more effective than nonviolence when a person or group was faced with the starkly brutal actions of one’s enemies.
Malcolm X and this threat of violence in the absence of justice probably hastened passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, for which the nonviolent movement led by Martin Luther King is generally given credit. But in my view, the principles of satyagraha as a code of nonviolent thought and action are superior to those of violence, however effective the latter may be in terms of immediate effect.
Nonviolence requires great love, enormous discipline, and great sacrifice. Completely consistent application often falls away in the face of immediate and clear danger to those one most deeply loves. But pursued as an ideal, followed in most cases, applied broadly to all of humanity, nonviolence would make of this world a more loving, kind, and hospitable arena wherein humankind could dwell, living life much closer to the ideal in this one earthly sojourn.
Notes
1. Joan Bondurant, Chapter II (Two), “Satyagraha: Its Basic Precepts,” Conquest of Violence: The Gandhian Philosophy of Conflict (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1971), pp. 15-35.
2. Ibid., p. 16.
3. Ibid., p. 19. Here Bondurant quotes Gandhi as asserting, “As long as I have not realized Absolute Truth, so long must I hold by this relative truth as I have conceived it. This truth must be my beacon, my shield, and buckler.”
4. Ibid., p. 22.
5. Ibid., p. 25.
6. Ibid., p. 24.
7. Ibid., p. 26.
8. Martin Luther King, Jr., Chapter VI (Six), “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence,” Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story (New York: Perennial/ Harper & Row, 1958), pp. 72-88.
9. Ibid., p. 73.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid., pp. 74-77.
12. Ibid., pp. 77-78.
13. Ibid., pp. 79-81. On p. 79, King very briefly cites his reading of Mill, Hobbes, and Rousseau but on pp. 79-81 gives a more detailed account of Niebuhr’s ideas concerning the propensity of humankind for both good and evil.
14. Ibid., pp. 78-79.
15. Ibid., pp. 83-84.
16. Ibid., p. 84.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid., p. 85.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid., p. 88.
21. Ibid., pp. 86-88.
22. Alex Ayres, ed., found according to the thematic alphabetization scheme under “Nonviolence” in The Wisdom of Martin Luther King (New York: Meridian/ Penguin, 1993), p. 166. The quotation is taken from its original presentation in Martin Luther King, Jr., Why We Can’t Wait (New York: Harper & Row, 1964).
23. Ibid., p.167. The quotation is taken form its original presentation in Martin Luther King, Jr., The Trumpet of Conscience (New York: Harper & Row, 1967).
24. Ibid. The quotation is originally from Why We Can’t Wait, consistent with the full citation information given above.
25. Warren Halliburton, ed., Malcolm X, “Address to Mississippi Youth,” Historic Speeches of African Americans (New York: Perennial/ Harper & Row, 1967).
26. Ibid., p. 132.
27. Ibid., p. 133.
References
Note: This listing of sources either cited specifically or used as general background material also frequently goes under such headings as “Bibliography” or ‘Works Cited.” The following list includes the four sources I used in writing this paper (found in “Notes” on immediately previous pages), and in addition I have provided the full publishing information for the works that Alex Ayres consulted to obtain the quotations of Martin Luther King that I used from the Ayres book.
Ayres, Alex, ed. “Nonviolence,” The Wisdom of Martin Luther King, Jr. New York: Meridian/ Penguin, 1993, pp. 164-170.
Bondurant, Joan V. Chapter II (Two), “Satyagraha: Its Basic Precepts,” Conquest of Violence: The Gandhian Philosophy of Social Conflict. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1971, pp. 15-35.
Halliburton, Warren J., ed. Malcolm X, “Address to Mississippi Youth,” Historic Speeches of African Americans. New York: The African American Experience/ Franklin Watts, 1993, pp. 129-133.
King, Martin Luther, Jr. Chapter VI (Six), “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence,” Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story. New York: Perennial/ Harper & Row, 1958, pp. 72-88.
King, Martin Luther, Jr. The Trumpet of Conscience. New York: Harper & Row, 1967.
King, Martin Luther, Jr. Why We Can’t Wait. New York: Harper & Row, 1964.
Gary Marvin Davison, Ph. D.
Director, New Salem Educational Initiative
With regard to the use of violence in promoting social change, the great leaders Mohandas K. Gandhi and Martin Luther King were in accord: Violence begets more violence and casts those in disagreement with one another as spiteful enemies rather than as opponents engaged in a test of ideas.
Malcolm X had a different view: Although rarely invoked in the immediacy of the moment as the preferred means of action, for Malcolm X violence was one of those options among “any means necessary” reserved for the achievement of goals consistent with the long-term best interests of humanity, especially that portion of humanity long denied fundamental rights of citizenship. In this paper I advance the view that a commitment to nonviolence is preferable to the use of violence for the achievement of political and social justice, for reasons cogently argued by both Gandhi and King. In advancing this thesis, I acknowledge the impact that Malcolm X had on the political events of his place and time; consistent with my thesis, I explain the difference between the immediate benefit of the threat of violence for the achievement of social and political ends, versus the enduring benefits of the commitment to nonviolence as the means to attainment of a more peaceful and loving future for humankind.
In Chapter II of her masterful Conquest of Violence (1), Joan Bondurant discusses the fundamental tenets of Mohandas K. Gandhi’s philosophy of satyagraha, through which he sought to overcome the might of the British Empire. Satya means “Truth.” Graha means “holding firmly.” The term, satyagraha, therefore, means “holding firmly to the Truth."(2)
Gandhi regarded the Truth to be so important as to be in identity with God. And rather than echo the phrasing of “God Is Love” with a similar, “God is Truth,” Gandhi underscored the divinity of Truth with the expression, “Truth is God.”
For Gandhi, Truth with a capital “T” is the first great principle of satyagraha for which humanity must strive.(3) All that human beings can ever know, Gandhi said, is truth with a lower case “t,” that truth as it appears to a mere human being at any given moment in time. Since a mere human being can never know for sure that she or he is correct about a matter in dispute, there is always the possibility that one’s opponent is right.
Ahimsa is the second major principle of satyagraha, the Sanskrit term that comes closest to the English term, “nonviolence.” But in Gandhi’s conception and in the best rendering of the term, ahimsa means more precisely, “refusing to do harm.”(4) If no individual can ever know that she or he is right, violence could never be justified and must be refused: Truth would be destroyed with an act of violence.(5)
Further, ahimsa is such an act of devotion toward the best interests of one’s opponent as to be synonymous with “love”:
I accept the interpretation of Ahimsa namely that it is not merely
a negative state of harmlessness but it is a positive state of love,
of doing good even to the evil-doer. But it does not mean helping
the evil-doer to continue to do wrong or tolerating it by passive
acquiescence. On the contrary, love, the active state of Ahimsa,
requires you to resist the wrong-doer.(6)
Gandhi’s reasoned commitment to nonviolence (ahimsa) gave rise to the third great principle of satyagraha: tapasya or “self-suffering."(7) With the willingness to undergo self-suffering as necessary, the nonviolent proponent of social change commits to a course of action that inflicts no violence but receives violence as necessary. The willingness to receive violence becomes a powerful expression of love for one’s opponent, against whom one struggles to convert rather than conquer.
Martin Luther King, in the sixth chapter of his book, Stride Toward Freedom(8), gives powerful testimony to just how highly he regarded Mohandas Gandhi’s formulation of nonviolence in satyagraha. Dr. King details how he read and appreciated, if he did not agree completely with, the ideas of many Western authors: Henry David Thoreau(9), Walter Rauschenbusch(10), Karl Marx(11), Friedrich Nietzsche(12), John Stuart Mill, Thomas Hobbes, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and Reinhold Niebuhr(13). But it was a lecture on the ideas of Mohandas K. Gandhi by Dr. Mordecai Johnson(14) that gave him his ideological framework for social action.
Dr. King identifies six aspects of Gandhi’s philosophy and program for action in satyagraha that are germane and inspiring for waging a social movement such as that for Civil Rights in the United States. First, he stresses that nonviolent resistance calls for courageous action, rather than passivity(15). Second, he emphasizes the appeal of converting the opponent to one’s viewpoint, rather than seeking to defeat one’s adversary(16). Third, he focuses on Gandhi’s emphasis on evil actions, rather than evil people(17). Fourth, he explains the need to endure suffering as additional proof of the courage that attends satyagraha, and stresses the sincerity that such sacrifice entails(18). Fifth, he finds appealing the Gandhian idea that thought, as well as action, is necessary in the commitment to nonviolence--- that one must seek to demonstrate internal, spiritual nonviolence, regarding harmful thoughts about one’s opponent to be as abhorrent as physical violence(19). Finally, Dr. King found enormously powerful Gandhi’s idea that the universe is on the side of justice, so that a commitment to satyagraha aligns one with the God who represents the ideal of just action in behalf of humankind.(20)
Dr. King found the Gandhian formulation of satyagraha to offer a commitment to the principles of universal love (agape) and sacrifice (as found most saliently in the Crucifixion) that follow the best inclinations of Christianity.(21)
In other works, Martin Luther King called upon the United States to turn away from the frontier tradition of violent retaliation(22), sought to promote nonviolence in all areas of human conflict (with implicit implementation on an international scale)(23), and made the case that nonviolence is paradoxically the most powerful of all weapons:
Nonviolence is a powerful and just weapon. It is unique in history,
which cuts without wounding, and ennobles the man who wields
it. It is a sword that heals (24).
Against this ethic of satyagraha advanced by both Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Malcolm X objected to nonviolence on the basis of what he saw as its irrational applications and its frequent situational ineffectiveness. In his “Address to Mississippi Youth,” Malcolm X tells an audience of thirty-seven adolescents,
My experience has been that in many instances where you
find Negroes talking about nonviolence… they mean they’re
nonviolent with somebody with else. They are nonviolent
with the enemy… a person can come out to your home, and
if he’s white and wants to heap some kind of brutality on you,
you’re nonviolent… but if another Negro just stomps his foot,
you’ll rumble with him in a minute… which shows you there’s
an inconsistency there.(25)
Malcolm X also raises the very real spectacle of vulnerability to white violence in the absence of armed resistance:
We of the Organization of African American Unitty are… with
the efforts to register our people to vote one thousand percent.
But we do not go along with anyone telling us to help nonviolently.
We think that… if some kind of Ku Klux Klan is going to put
[Negroes] in the river, and the government doesn’t do anything
about it, it’s time for us to organize and band together and equip
ourselves and qualify ourselves to protect ourselves. And when
you can protect yourself, you don’t have to worry about being hurt.(26)
Malcolm X states that he is not driven by hate. But he recoils from the ethic of universally applied love:
I don’t have hate in me. I have no hate at all. I have some sense. I’m not going to let someone who hates me tell me to love him.
I’m not that way out. And you, young as you are, you’re not
going to do it either. The only time you’re going to get in that
bag is if somebody puts you there. Somebody else, who doesn’t
have your welfare at heart.(28)
Any differences in the thought and action of Mohandas K. Gandhi and Martin Luther King are those of emphasis and lexicon. Martin Luther King studied in great detail the principles of satyagraha of Mohandas Gandhi and understood those principles in their original context. But he applied those principles as a Christian pastor, seeing them through the prism of agape, the Greek term for universal love that Christians came to identify with the Spirit moving in the life, activity, and teachings of Jesus. Martin Luther King credited Gandhi for demonstrably moving the guiding force of love from the level of individual interaction to the social sphere. Dr. King clearly stated that Gandhi was his inspiration for the application of the principles of satyagraha and ahimsa to the Civil Rights Movement in the American cultural and political context.
In the manner of these fellow agitators for social change, Malcolm X was a man of tremendous courage and commitment. He shared with them a passion for a better world, one in which all people are accorded their proper dignity, a world in which those who historically have been abused permanently gain the respect that they deserve.
Malcolm X differed fundamentally from Gandhi and King, though, as to matters of nonviolence, love, and effective action. Malcolm X regarded nonviolence as an inconsistently applied creed that African Americans resorted to meekly when faced with white oppression but disregarded in responses to each other. He stated explicitly that he harbored no hate but would not be told to love his enemies.
And he saw those enemies as the other, not the same in constitution as friends. He thought that violence tended to be more effective than nonviolence when a person or group was faced with the starkly brutal actions of one’s enemies.
Malcolm X and this threat of violence in the absence of justice probably hastened passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, for which the nonviolent movement led by Martin Luther King is generally given credit. But in my view, the principles of satyagraha as a code of nonviolent thought and action are superior to those of violence, however effective the latter may be in terms of immediate effect.
Nonviolence requires great love, enormous discipline, and great sacrifice. Completely consistent application often falls away in the face of immediate and clear danger to those one most deeply loves. But pursued as an ideal, followed in most cases, applied broadly to all of humanity, nonviolence would make of this world a more loving, kind, and hospitable arena wherein humankind could dwell, living life much closer to the ideal in this one earthly sojourn.
Notes
1. Joan Bondurant, Chapter II (Two), “Satyagraha: Its Basic Precepts,” Conquest of Violence: The Gandhian Philosophy of Conflict (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1971), pp. 15-35.
2. Ibid., p. 16.
3. Ibid., p. 19. Here Bondurant quotes Gandhi as asserting, “As long as I have not realized Absolute Truth, so long must I hold by this relative truth as I have conceived it. This truth must be my beacon, my shield, and buckler.”
4. Ibid., p. 22.
5. Ibid., p. 25.
6. Ibid., p. 24.
7. Ibid., p. 26.
8. Martin Luther King, Jr., Chapter VI (Six), “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence,” Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story (New York: Perennial/ Harper & Row, 1958), pp. 72-88.
9. Ibid., p. 73.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid., pp. 74-77.
12. Ibid., pp. 77-78.
13. Ibid., pp. 79-81. On p. 79, King very briefly cites his reading of Mill, Hobbes, and Rousseau but on pp. 79-81 gives a more detailed account of Niebuhr’s ideas concerning the propensity of humankind for both good and evil.
14. Ibid., pp. 78-79.
15. Ibid., pp. 83-84.
16. Ibid., p. 84.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid., p. 85.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid., p. 88.
21. Ibid., pp. 86-88.
22. Alex Ayres, ed., found according to the thematic alphabetization scheme under “Nonviolence” in The Wisdom of Martin Luther King (New York: Meridian/ Penguin, 1993), p. 166. The quotation is taken from its original presentation in Martin Luther King, Jr., Why We Can’t Wait (New York: Harper & Row, 1964).
23. Ibid., p.167. The quotation is taken form its original presentation in Martin Luther King, Jr., The Trumpet of Conscience (New York: Harper & Row, 1967).
24. Ibid. The quotation is originally from Why We Can’t Wait, consistent with the full citation information given above.
25. Warren Halliburton, ed., Malcolm X, “Address to Mississippi Youth,” Historic Speeches of African Americans (New York: Perennial/ Harper & Row, 1967).
26. Ibid., p. 132.
27. Ibid., p. 133.
References
Note: This listing of sources either cited specifically or used as general background material also frequently goes under such headings as “Bibliography” or ‘Works Cited.” The following list includes the four sources I used in writing this paper (found in “Notes” on immediately previous pages), and in addition I have provided the full publishing information for the works that Alex Ayres consulted to obtain the quotations of Martin Luther King that I used from the Ayres book.
Ayres, Alex, ed. “Nonviolence,” The Wisdom of Martin Luther King, Jr. New York: Meridian/ Penguin, 1993, pp. 164-170.
Bondurant, Joan V. Chapter II (Two), “Satyagraha: Its Basic Precepts,” Conquest of Violence: The Gandhian Philosophy of Social Conflict. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1971, pp. 15-35.
Halliburton, Warren J., ed. Malcolm X, “Address to Mississippi Youth,” Historic Speeches of African Americans. New York: The African American Experience/ Franklin Watts, 1993, pp. 129-133.
King, Martin Luther, Jr. Chapter VI (Six), “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence,” Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story. New York: Perennial/ Harper & Row, 1958, pp. 72-88.
King, Martin Luther, Jr. The Trumpet of Conscience. New York: Harper & Row, 1967.
King, Martin Luther, Jr. Why We Can’t Wait. New York: Harper & Row, 1964.
Vocabulary for Research Paper Assignment Evaluating Nonviolent versus Violent Strategies
I render to my students in the New Salem Educational Initiative a great deal of explicitly learned vocabulary. This is very important for students whose parents or significant adults have limited education, do not read very much diverse and challenging material, or are not native English speakers. The list given here is derived from the sources used in researching the paper, and from the terms that I use in writing the model research paper.
6. relativism >>>>> the philosophical position that Truth may vary place, time, and circumstances
(synthesis)
33. divergent >>>>> moving in different directions; going off along diverse pathways
35. stagnant >>>>> remaining the same, typically amidst corrupted or polluted circumstances
1. consummation >>>>> final act of accomplishment of a task,
often having moved through various stages toward
completion
2. manifestation
>>>>> the physical
form or action that clearly represents or demonstrates an idea
3. elucidate
>>>>> to make
clear through vivid explanation, often with the provision of clarifying
examples
4. ontological
>>>>> adjective
describing philosophical speculation on the being or existence of
humankind
5. epistemological >>>>> adjective describing philosophical
speculation or logically sequenced
reasoning concerning
knowledge and ways of knowing 6. relativism >>>>> the philosophical position that Truth may vary place, time, and circumstances
7. acquiescence
>>>>> going along
with, complying, being compliant
8. cognizable
>>>>>
recognizable, comprehensible,
knowable
9. espouse >>>>> to posit, promulgate, or put forward one’s
ideas
10. exposition
>>>>> reasoned and
logically sequenced presentation of one’s ideas
11. votary
>>>>> worshiper; devotee
12. voluntarism >>>>> happening due to human choice, rather than
according to some predetermined set
of circumstances
13. determinism
>>>>> happening
due to some predetermined, already decided set of circumstances, rather than as a matter of human volition or choice
14. elegy
>>>>> a poetic, serious,
and pensive tribute, most notably given in behalf of the recently
deceased
15. subversive
>>>>> secretly
working to undermine or destroy established practices
16. seditious
>>>>> subversive,
with the implication of social unacceptability or illegality
17. deprecation
>>>>> demeaning or
belittling a person or a way of thinking
18. bourgeois
>>>>> adjective
describing a middle class of people and their values, positioned between the aristocracy (those of nobility and
wealth as a matter of birth) and the proletariat
19. bourgeoisie
>>>>> a middle
class of people and their values, positioned between the aristocracy and the proletariat
20. proletariat
>>>>> the working
class, especially those performing wage labor in urban factories
21. feudalism
>>>>> the
political and economic system prevalent in the European Middle Ages,
dominated
by the aristocracy, for whom serfs labored in residentially permanent circumstances on land held
as fiefdoms (granted by the monarch or other authority)
22. capitalism
>>>>> economic
system characterized by a high degree of individual
entrepreneurial
(commercially enterprising, venturous) freedom
23. socialism
>>>>> economic
system characterized by a high degree of government
involvement and
oversight
24. irreconcilable >>>>> the inability to reconcile or to bring two
contending forces together
25. materialism
>>>>> philosophy
or outlook referring to reality as observed in the physical world
26. idealism
>>>>> philosophy
or outlook referring to reality perceived through cognition and
reasoning, revealed
in the realm of ideas
27. totalitarianism >>>>> political system in which the government is
active in every aspect of the
lives
of people under that government’s authority and jurisdiction
28. dialectic
>>>>> the process
whereby an initial idea or circumstance (thesis) interacts with
another idea or circumstance (antithesis) to create a completely new idea
or circumstance(synthesis)
29. pacifism
>>>>> the
philosophical commitment to peace under all circumstances--- including
a
vow to condemn and refuse to participate in warfare
30. monumental
>>>>> occurring on
a grand scale
31. metaphysical
>>>>> adjective
that covers the broad range of considerations important in philosophical thought, such as ontology and epistemology; now in practical usage tends to connote that realm of knowledge that is so abstract as to defy certain understanding--- by contrast with the move provable findings of natural science
32. coherence
>>>>> having unity
in thought; fitting together in a
logical pattern; making sense
as an understandable whole33. divergent >>>>> moving in different directions; going off along diverse pathways
34. boycott
>>>>> the refusal
to purchase goods or services from those whose practices are
considered unjust35. stagnant >>>>> remaining the same, typically amidst corrupted or polluted circumstances
36. agape
>>>>> Greek term for the
love of all humankind; universal
love; the altruistic and empathic love
that abides in a person’s
heart for every other human being
37. philia >>>>> Greek term for the love that abides in a person’s heart for
friends, family members, and other close associates
38. eros >>>>> Greek term for romantic or sexual love
39. spiteful
>>>>>
vengeful; full of ill-feeling and
the desire to inflict harm in word or deed
40. lexicon
>>>>> set of words
used for particular subject manner or in a given cultural context
41. stark
>>>>> bracingly or
startlingly frank, blunt, or apparent
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)