Colman McCarthy Biography Quotes 2 Report mistakes

Overview
Colman McCarthy is an American journalist, teacher, and peace activist whose career has bridged national opinion journalism and classroom-based peace education. Known for a long run as a columnist for The Washington Post and for founding the Center for Teaching Peace, he has spent decades arguing that nonviolence is not merely a moral commitment but a practical set of skills that can be taught, practiced, and institutionalized. McCarthy's work has combined public commentary with hands-on instruction in schools, universities, and prisons, making him a distinctive figure in American civic life.

Journalism Career
McCarthy's national profile grew through his years as a columnist at The Washington Post, where he wrote frequently on issues of war and peace, poverty, prisons, animal welfare, and social justice. At the Post he worked in an environment shaped by prominent figures such as executive editor Ben Bradlee and publisher Katharine Graham, with the editorial page molded by Meg Greenfield. Among the columnists of his era was Mary McGrory, whose presence alongside McCarthy underscored the Post's tradition of strong, individual voices. Within that culture of rigorous editing and spirited debate, McCarthy's column stood out for its persistent return to nonviolence as a lens on public policy and personal conduct. Rather than treating peace as an abstract aspiration, he reported on people and programs attempting to resolve conflicts without force, and he scrutinized how institutions normalize violence in curricula, budgets, and everyday language.

Turning to Teaching
While still writing, McCarthy increasingly invested in education, arguing that societies get the peace they teach. In 1985 he founded the Center for Teaching Peace, a nonprofit dedicated to bringing courses in nonviolence and conflict resolution to classrooms. Through the organization he developed curricula, trained educators, and helped schools adopt for-credit classes on peace studies. He went beyond universities to teach in public high schools and in detention and prison settings, convinced that the skills of listening, mediation, and restorative justice are most needed where conflicts are most acute. His students ranged from teenagers preparing for college to adults in custody confronting the realities of harm and repair. McCarthy insisted that peace education was not a luxury course, but a practical civic necessity on par with math and literacy.

Classroom Practice and People Around Him
McCarthy's teaching style is grounded in dialogue and lived experience. He often invited guests from across the spectrum of public life, activists, veterans, public defenders, community organizers, to speak with students about how conflicts are created and solved. He asked students to practice mediation, write reflective journals, and analyze current events with attention to the hidden costs of violence. The figures he most frequently cited in class and in print included Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., whose experiments in nonviolent direct action framed his approach. He also drew on voices such as Dorothy Day, Daniel Berrigan, and Thomas Merton to connect personal conscience with public engagement. In the newsroom, the standards set by Ben Bradlee and Katharine Graham shaped McCarthy's reporting habits, verify, ask again, and write with clarity, while the editorial guidance of Meg Greenfield reinforced his commitment to argument grounded in evidence. The interplay of those professional relationships and intellectual influences gave McCarthy's teaching a distinctive blend of moral seriousness, investigative curiosity, and wry skepticism about easy answers.

Books and Public Voice
Beyond columns and classrooms, McCarthy has written books that extend his arguments to general audiences. All of One Peace: Essays on Nonviolence gathers reporting and reflection on people and movements working to reduce violence. I'd Rather Teach Peace distills his classroom experiences, offering stories of students, practical lesson ideas, and a case for making peace studies a standard part of education. In talks delivered at schools and community forums around the country, he has urged administrators to measure success not only by test scores and sports victories but by how well students learn to resolve conflicts without coercion or cruelty. His public voice, while resolute, is also pragmatic: he advocates policies such as restorative justice programs, alternatives to zero-tolerance school discipline, and the expansion of community-based conflict mediation.

Ideas and Advocacy
McCarthy's central premise is that violence persists not only because of malice but because of habit and training. If schools teach trigonometry, he argues, they can teach negotiation; if they assign classic wars in literature, they can also assign classic peacemaking. He challenges the assumption that defense and policing budgets are untouchable while social programs are optional, urging a reassessment of priorities through the lens of long-term community safety and well-being. In prison classrooms he has emphasized the dignity and agency of people who are incarcerated, asking students to examine how cycles of harm might be interrupted by accountability, restitution, and reintegration rather than retribution alone. His approach does not ignore conflict; it insists that conflict is inevitable and that the methods chosen to address it matter.

Impact and Legacy
The Center for Teaching Peace has helped seed courses and teacher trainings around the United States, and McCarthy's syllabi have circulated widely among educators seeking to formalize peace studies. Many of his former students have gone on to careers in law, social work, education, public health, journalism, and community organizing, often citing his classes as an early prompt to take conflict resolution seriously as a craft. In journalism, he demonstrated that a peace beat, reporting on creative, nonviolent problem-solving, is as legitimate as a crime or war beat. In education, he helped move peace studies from the margins toward the mainstream by showing that students respond to rigorous, reality-based instruction on nonviolence.

Continuing Work
McCarthy has remained active as a teacher, lecturer, and mentor, constantly revising his courses to include contemporary case studies, from school discipline reforms to community mediation initiatives and global nonviolent movements. He continues to engage with educators, students, parents, and civic leaders who are building programs that embody the principles he has championed. The throughline across his decades of work, shaped in the newsroom by colleagues like Ben Bradlee, Katharine Graham, Meg Greenfield, and Mary McGrory, and in the classroom by the example of Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Dorothy Day, Daniel Berrigan, and Thomas Merton, is a belief that peace is learned. Colman McCarthy's biography is the story of turning that belief into a lifetime of practical, public teaching.

Our collection contains 2 quotes who is written by Colman, under the main topics: Peace - War.