Nonviolence comes to DeWitt Clinton High School, Part 1 - a visit from Mark Kurlansky

by Raymond Pultinas

Last summer, I picked up some small stones from the bed of the Westfield River while vacationing in Western Massachusetts and they reminded me of what I’ve written and thought about for some time now.   Entering and wading in a cool river creates the kind of moment I need to have before returning to the practice of teaching high school students. Sitting and stretching in the buoyancy and flow of water I touch a stone made smooth over the course of this river’s life, millions of years in the making.  I hold the stone in my hand.  I work the stone with my fingers. 

The work of educating one’s emotional sensibilities, one’s self control, I imagine might take a process that is akin to this patient circular rubbing of a smooth stone between thumb and forefinger for the act of rubbing is deliberation itself.  In practice, I am  educating myself to be at peace in the world and it requires just such patience and contemplation, I would think.  The process involves affirming but holding the passions we carry; not acting first, but thinking first.  During these times, we look for a center, and the stone seems to signal for us this retreat into the contemplative - away from the world.

So I imagine carrying this stone around with me wherever I go and taking it out as needed to think through a problem.  To gently rub the stone smoother, perhaps somewhat prayerfully, as an accompaniment to the consideration of what to do next, where to go, what is right and what is wrong, what is best, or any other question that needs an application of thought or thinking through.  The gentle rolling of the smooth stone with the fingers accompanies deliberation and thinking in harmony with it.

David in his epic battle picks up the same smooth stone perfect for sling-shot and hurls it into the forehead of Goliath.   A boy is caught on video throwing a stone through tear gas at soldiers behind shields.  Throwing a stone in anger to hurt, damage or destroy is a choice that some humans make.  It is the choice to be violent.  Countless circumstances, provocations, self-defenses, just causes will certainly complicate any discussion of violence, but at its heart, at its origin, at its core, one might find and feel a smooth stone and what to do with it. Carry it or throw it and under what circumstances?  The choice to do one or the other is a defining moment of life and “coming of age.” 

In his book Nonviolence: Twenty-Five Lessons from the History of a Dangerous Idea, Mark Kurlansky examines an historic arc of nonviolent resistance from biblical times to the present.  In the fall of 2010, Mr. Kurlansky visited a combined class of sixty 12^th grade literary criticism students at DeWitt Clinton to discuss nonviolence in an event made possible through Behind the Book. The book fills in a substantial gap in our knowledge of names and events that have been central to the nonviolent movement for centuries. Students prepared for the visit by reading and discussing each chapter, constructing group presentations to a class audience who also researched deeper, generated vocabulary lists, developed questions, debated points, wrote poetic improvisations, and created wonderful and incisive drawings.  

I was interested in the connections students could make between Mr. Kurlansky’s book and what they were presently facing in a school saturated in hostility and violence.  Last year around this time, DeWitt Clinton was a much different place than it is now.  Each period of each day was punctuated by some disturbance in the halls or in our own classrooms.   Large groups of defiant and troublesome teens would routinely circulate and instigate looking for open doors and fights would break out.  Even some of our best students would run out to the halls in a frenetic and bloodthirsty way to spectate on some faked or real physical and emotional turmoil. 

Nonetheless, prior to Mr. Kurlansky's visit, groups of students in my literary criticism class prepared and presented chapters in literary circles for about a month and constructed a visually enticing wall of hope, a museum of responses with comments and drawings inspired by our discussion of nonviolence.  The behavior of students, the tone of the school and the newspaper headlines of the day immediately became the common reference point in our discussion.  Our school had become a microcosm study of global and national unrest and discontent.  And in the midst of chaos some students chose to pick up the smooth stone of contemplation and deliberate.

In Part 2, I’ll share some of these student voices and more excerpts from Mark Kurlansky's visit.