Awakenings to the Calling of Nonviolence in Curriculum Studies

Nonviolence as a Personal Calling

Nonviolence is a personal calling for me. It started before I was born, in the heyday of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) in China when my mother was pregnant. She believed that her anxiety, fear, and confusion during that chaotic time must have been passed on to me. The Cultural Revolution was a destructive mass mobilization that overthrew authorities and demolished traditions in an ongoing, unpredictable process under the rhetoric of class struggles, manipulated by dictatorship (Wang, 2014). The nation was near collapse economically, socially, and culturally, and violence in a whole range of areas was released during that decade. If the fetus can feel the mother’s pain, the call for nonviolence is rooted in my personal unconscious. With the repudiation of both Confucianism and Daoism in China in the twentieth century, elements of nonviolence and the non-dualistic discernment in Daoism were criticized as incompatible with the imperative need for making progress toward modernization. The Chinese indigenous wisdom of inner and outer peace, although still practiced in people’s daily lives in one way or another, became buried in the official curriculum for the new generations. Instead, revolutionary violence against enemies was celebrated and political control was solidified in these struggles and nation-building. Ironically, the faces of the enemy kept changing, and no one was safe.

Nonviolence stayed in my unconscious, as I was born into the official ideology of dividing people into either good or bad to justify controlling mechanisms. However, also growing up with the trauma literature about the Cultural Revolution that revealed its categorical thinking (Lin, 1991) and the cruel treatment of those who were different, I was horrified by the unleashing of human brutality and always wished that violence would go away. The desire to end the fighting between persons or groups amicably grew deep in my heart as a child. The years of my youth were during a relatively peaceful time in China, when its economy grew fast and people’s lives dramatically changed for the better. However, we were still in the grip of moral, ideological, and political control. Experiencing the personal and national trauma of the Tiananmen Massacre in 1989, when what was right became upside down during my college years, led me to question everything and eventually I came to the United States to witness another way of life (Wang, 2014).

The Curriculum Theory Project at Louisiana State University in which I participated as a doctoral student challenged me more than ever to intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually integrate the self in my cross-cultural journey (Wang, 2023). I was not pressured to be assimilated but to be “placed together” in an ongoing process of transformation (Pinar, 1994, p. 27). During that same period, I began to go back to the Chinese classics to dig into their wisdom. However, upon graduation, when I started to teach at Oklahoma State University in the Fall semester of 2001, September 11 happened and wars against dissidents and perceived enemies marched on. I witnessed how democracy was used repeatedly to justify violence in local, national, and international settings in the post-September 11 age and the No Child Left Behind educational era.

As Ted Aoki (2005) points out, a separate sense of the individual is the foundation of Western democracy. It became clear to me that democracy does not necessarily have an inherent mechanism against violence, and my recent reading of Annelien de Dijn’s (2020) historical study of Western democratic freedom confirms that defending freedom through force or even violence started with the Greco-Roman tradition. I can see its link to the Western domination of the world through colonization and neoliberalism. Today’s international relations are marked by the arguments for achieving world peace through the use of military force.

Houston Wood (2016) points out that “democratic leaders may choose war more often than autocrats” (p. 100) partly for solidifying people’s approval in elections within their own nations while autocrats are not concerned with the people’s will. He believes that there will be less war with more and more democratic countries established, since democratic nations do not tend to go to war against one another. If the mechanism of violence against (make-believe) enemies is inherent in Western democracy, I have to ask, on what basis can world peace be achieved? Or is such peace simply another form of domination? Let us not forget that the two world wars in the twentieth century were largely initiated by European countries. Peace studies originated in the West is shadowed by its ethnocentric biases. That is part of the reason that I prefer the term “nonviolence” over “peace” in my work. With my questioning of liberal democracy, I was again on the road of seeking new pathways.

Gandhi’s theory and practice of nonviolence surfaced as I was searching. However, not until 2009 did I clearly hear the ringing of the bell for nonviolence. I have detailed this journey in my book, Nonviolence and Education, which depicts a qualitative, life history project studying Chinese and American professors’ engagements with the counterpart culture and education (Wang, 2014). For this project, I not only listened to those professors’ stories, but also listened to my own whisper as a little girl who was longing for nonviolence and compassion, a voice suppressed by the official curriculum, which legitimated violence in various forms. Nonviolence education became a calling for me as I was awakened by its voices from both personal and collective history. Afterward, I quickly discovered Michael Nagler’s (2004) inspiring book, The Search for a Nonviolent Future, in which he convincingly argues that nonviolence has always existed in human history, and that we must harness its integrative power. My commitment was sealed.

I wrote “Nonviolence as a Zero Space” as an editorial for the Journal of Curriculum Theorizing in 2010, right after I had returned from China. The same year I was also invited to make a presentation to the Professors of Curriculum group, where I introduced nonviolence as a curriculum vision. From the beginning of my conceptualization, I have been mindful of being inclusive and not pitting nonviolence against other existing visions, and I use the term “zero” to indicate that “nonviolence is not attached to any particular form except insisting on its nonviolent principle” (Wang, 2010, p. 5) and that it can be compatible with democracy, justice, or Christian spirituality when the nature of relationality is restorative and compassionate. More than anything else, however, I believe, nonviolence has an inherent capacity to counteract violence while restoring broken relationships through compassion for all participants. It is essentially an educational project, as personal cultivation of integrative capacity occurs through education and self-education; and without intentionally developing such capacity, nonviolence cannot play its important role. Since curriculum lies at the center of education, nonviolence becomes its mission as well.

My personal calling started with challenging the normalization of violence in both China and the United States, but in the process of conceptualizing nonviolence as an educational concept, I have learned that nonviolence is a positive force grounded in the interconnectedness of the self, the other, and the cosmos to mobilize relational dynamics that harmonize tensions and differences (Nagler, 2004; Wang, 2014). I have come to believe that this positive, sustainable strength of nonviolence is the foundation for dissolving violence and thus a more fundamental life force. It is from this understanding that I perceive the role of nonviolence education as cultivating loving capacities for bridging divides within the self and between the self and others; building a generative and compassionate community that integrates polarized divisions in schools, colleges, and society; and sustaining the interconnected creativity of humanity and nature.

Nonviolence as a Calling of Our Time

While nonviolence is a personal calling traced back to my childhood and youth, I also believe that it is the calling of our time. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1960/1986) declared, “It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence. It is nonviolence or nonexistence” (p. 39). This siren call, issued more than half a century ago, is even more urgent today, as we are in a mode of crisis and survival. At the planetary level, climate catastrophes threaten human and ecological existence in an unprecedented way, and modern science, technology, and human instrumental uses of nature have contributed a great deal to such crises (Bai & Cohen, 2008). At the level of international relations, conflicts, domination, and wars are ongoing. The national politics in the United States and other countries are intensely polarized and nationalistic, while local politics in many states is increasingly oppressive with censorship and exclusive policies. Racial and gender injustice has been intensified, against which the Black Lives Matter and the “Me Too” movements have been contesting.

The expansion of gun rights in the United States is happening at the same time as mass shootings continue to shock the nation and the majority of Americans support gun control. The phrase “gun violence” is so misleading, however, as it hides the human actors. It is true that the military–industrial–political-complex associated with gun production and distribution has made the United States an exceptional country, one that has been ineffective in implementing appropriate gun regulations. However, does a gun shoot itself? Why is the actor in the violence invisible? Why don’t we reflect on the conception and practice of hypermasculinity and racism in the United States (Burns, 2018; Pinar, 2001) that is entrenched in the logic of violence? Are there links between mass shootings and state-sanctioned killing in various forms? Why don’t we discuss the culture of violence that contributes to the mechanisms of control and mastery that divide the self from the other? Why not address the desperation of younger generations, as the age of mass shooters has gone down? During recent years, school security is framed in many places as increasing surveillance at schools —including arming teachers—where students witness how guns and violence are used to go against (potential) violence. What kind of message is conveyed to the younger generation by doing so?

Recently schoolteachers and librarians have lost their control over what books to use, as school districts in some states can be penalized for only one parent’s objection that critical race theory is taught at schools. The intensification of social, racial, gendered, economical, and ecological tensions and fragmentation characterizes our time. Therefore, it has become more urgent to seek pathways that can transcend polarization, heal the divides, and foster compassionate relationships. Nonviolence, which can be found in the best traditions in many different cultures throughout human history, is the starlight that provides guidance in the darkness of our time. Through both nonviolent resistance and nonviolent relationality practiced on a daily basis in schools and community-based education (Romano, 2022), nonviolence holds the promise of shifting relational dynamics toward building a community that can engage dissensus, tensions, and differences to expand new horizons (Miller, 2010; Smith, 2021; Ziarek, 2001).

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the intertwining threads of interdependence and equity, which American individualism had concealed, became much more visible (Poindexter et al., 2021). The virus’ disregard of man-made boundaries has made it clear that collaboration and solidarity across differences are necessary for dealing with such a global emergency. We are literally breathing the same air. As Judith Butler (2020) points out, the felt vulnerability is not so much a feeling, as it is a real part of our shared lives, an existential human condition that we must face. On the other hand, the poor, the elderly, Native Americans, African Americans, Latinx, and the urban populations in the United States suffered the most from the pandemic. The virus does not choose whom it targets, but susceptibility to infection and death as well as the damage in its aftermath are unequally distributed to different social groups because of previously existing conditions. These vulnerable populations suffered more from the neglect of public welfare. Ironically, violent protests against mask mandates in the name of freedom of choice also broke out (in contrast to nonviolent protests for racial equality), even if not wearing masks risked spreading infection to others.