Reverence for Life

Albert Schweitzer: Reverence for Live
Young Indiana Jones, DVD, (Vol. 2, Disk 4) 2007, NR

In 1993 George Lucas produced a television series, Young Indiana Jones, which showed his hero participating in many of the great events of his time. The series itself is surprisingly engaging, but the real gems for a peace educator are the special features that accompany each episode. In episode 11 “Oganga, the Giver and Taker of Life," Indy is in Africa and encounters Dr. Albert Schweitzer, recipient of the 1953 Nobel Peace Prize and, as a fellow Lutheran, a great hero of my own youth. This half hour feature will add depth to Schweitzer’s essay in lesson one of the Class of nonviolence and introduce new generations to this exceptional peacemaker. (The YouTube video is from the fictional series, not the accompanying documentary.)

The Mindless Menace of Violence

Bobby
DVD, 2006, R

Bobby is a fictionalized account of the hours leading up to the June 5, 1968 shooting of Robert F. Kennedy following his win in the California Democratic Party primary. The last scene (#16, 10 minutes) shows the assassination and its aftermath. As we watch in horror, Kennedy’s voice engages us, slowly intoning the speech he delivered the day after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. just a month before, “On the Mindless Menace of Violence.” This is incredibly powerful: in my opinion, one of the finest American speeches ever written. A printable version is available online from the JFK archives. Give everyone a copy. This could be a thoughtful opening for the first session, or a concluding meditation.

Goya's Ghost: does torture work?

Goya’s Ghost
DVD, 2006, R

In this film the painter Goya becomes involved with the Spanish Inquisition when his muse, Ines, is arrested by the church for heresy. The most powerful episode with contemporary relevance is about torture (scenes 12-14, about 10 minutes.) Ines is tortured into confessing that she is secretly practicing Jewish rites. Her father, in an attempt to get her released, invites the inquisitor to dinner with the family. He tries a bit of bribery, then logical argument, but Lorenzo will not budge. The father then has his sons and servants torture the monk to extract a false confession . . but let’s not give it all away. This is an excellent film, well worth watching in its entirety, although the scene in which Ines is tortured is probably not suitable for a high school audience. We sometimes show Goya’s paintings (The Third of May 1808 and the Disasters of War etchings) as part of lesson six, and this excerpt works well there too.

Gandhian Terms Crossword and Word Search

Gandhian Terms Crossword and Word Search
PDF handout

When reading about Gandhi I confess to sometimes muddling the unfamiliar terms: is “swaraj” self-rule or a boycott? (It’s self-rule, and I remember it by recalling that the British Raj indicated British rule.) This PDF file contains two separate handouts that give students an opportunity to play around with 15 of the words they may encounter in their Gandhian studies: ahimsa, bapu, bramacharya, charkha, Dalit, dhoti, fakir, Harijan, hartal, khadi, mahatma, sarvodaya, satyagraha, swadeshi and swaraj. The crossword puzzle is the harder of the two because it doesn’t include the words, just the definitions. The word search puzzle includes both words and definitions: in addition to searching out the words, though, it is necessary to match them up with the corresponding definition. I’m not going to provide you with the answers – looking up the ones you don’t know is your exercise!

The Great Debaters

The Great Debaters
DVD, 2007, PG-13

Based on a true story, The Great Debaters is about the 1935 Wiley College debate team from Marshall, Texas, who broke the color barrier to take on national champion Harvard (in real life it was USC, but let’s not quibble) and won. It’s a wonderful movie, evocative of the era and well worth showing in its entirety, but we show the last two scenes but one, #23 (The Harvard Debate) & #24 (Victory.) The students debated civil disobedience, Wiley invoking Thoreau and Gandhi and Harvard taking the side of the rule of law. It is an excellent conversation starter to accompany the reading of Thoreau’s “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience” in lesson seven.