ACEI POSITION PAPER
Children and War

BY THE ASSOCIATION FOR CHILDHOOD EDUCATION INTERNATIONAL, 1973

Children practically everywhere in the world today have grown up in an atmosphere of violence. What do they think about the concept of war? How have their views been developed? What does research tell us about the attitudes of children in other periods toward war? What can and should adults do in educating children for peace?

Ponder these excerpts from the writing of children (in third-, sixth-, seventh-, thenth-, eleventh-, and twelfth- grade classes in Sacramento, California):
To disentangle the issues of children’s reactions to war is like trying to unravel the threads of a tightly woven piece of cloth. Once-clear designs are set in disarray and the tightness of the fabric sags when significant threads are pulled or cut. The issues about which parents and teachers and researchers concerned themselves during and immediately after the Second World War were relatively well-defined in relation to specific events. Even a quick survey of the literature of the last fifteen years provides dramatic evidence, however, that conceptual changes have taken place in people’s thinking about war as concerns have deepened about violence and aggressiveness, ethnocentric disortions, mutual distrust and emotional isolation. Adults who care about children are engaged in a painful exploration of their own commitments to the world’s future and their impacts upn it.

Today, what is right and what is wrong cannot be demonstrated beyond doubt. The “word” is no longer available. But neither can decisions be avoided until guiding principles are enunciated by someone in authority or by global consensus (Slater, 1970). Every parent and every teacher must face up to highly personal ambivalences about war.

By upbringing and education, the present generation of teachers has been conditioned to the inevitability of war. In a survey of 2,677 children from grades three to eight in New York and New Jersey, Howard Tolley, Jr. (1973) found that the children and their teachers accepted the necessity of war at about the same extent. Witness these statistics from his provacative recent study of childhood political socialization:

Acceptance of the Need for War by Children and Their Teachers
Question: Wars are sometimes needed.
Response: Adapted from Table 111.1, p. 34 of Children and War (New York: Teachers College Press; 1973.) Used by permission of publisher.

Concerning Vietnam, about half those surveyed believed that the war was good “If the United States beats the Communists.”

Children are apparently still being taught to think of organized killing of human beings by other human beings as a natural and perhaps noble part of human experience.

How Much Do Children Know? It is not difficult to find propaganda in schools everywhere that favors war. Books whet the appetite for battles fought by heroes in the “good old days” when life was exciting and full of purpose. Even very young “cadet units” in some countries are being trained to think of war as a routine matter. Bulletin boards often give supposedly documentary treatment of the news, wherein those shown in battle are depicted as ordinary, decent men on if “on our side,” and are thereby classified not as killers but as potential victims.

Actual discussion of current wars and related issues does not seem to occur very often in the elementary school. Both Escalona (1971) and Tolley (1973) found teachers avoiding such matters, either because of concern to shield children from anxiety or because of reluctance to engender community objections and polarization. Commendable as these “reasonings” appear on the surface, they well may mask uncertain commitments to the myths of war and a desire to postpone instructional responsibilities for peace until the upper grades. But even very young children are already involved in the gut issues of conflict. Nursery school and kindergarten classrooms are intensely alive communities. Glib talk about sharing rarely resolves a struggle for possession. Standing up for a friend can have many cross-motivations. Warlike games and alliances have been know to blow up an otherwise peaceful program.

To the observant teacher, many conflict-attitudes and behaviors bear dramatic similarity to those of nations at war. Classroom or playground demands for unconditional surrender are frequent. Strategies for blocking off minority protest, while sometimes primitive, take shape very quickly. How one feels about oneself is invariably intermeshed with one’s feelings about others.

Inevitably children become caught up in the increasing mechanization and automation of modern warfare. To the war games, which children have played in all times and in most cultures, have been added toys that explode, dolls that bleed, death-rays that topple, tanks or ambulances that roar to the kill. Aase Skard (1972) in Norway makes a useful differentiation between materials that children invent for ferocious outpourings of energy in attack and the commercial “war” equipment that adults present to them, which provokes solitary, often frightening play—without rules or imaginative variations or socializing resolutions.

In addition to war toys, older children are exposed to an inescapable background of and knowledge about super weapons and super powers. With this information comes awareness of adult arguments concerning military spending versus social need and of evidences that weapons are stockpiled not for self-defense but to ward off sometimes created fears and remote threats. Television coverage brings immediate, terrifying (albeit vicarious) participation, not only in scenes of horror and bloodshed but also in feelings of distrust that relevant facts are being withheld. Protests about the draft and nuclear explosions that divide countries and unite generations are a part of children’s learnings about war, whether parents and teachers choose to talk about them or not.

What Does Research Tell Us?
For more than thirty years investigators have been finding that children have more current information about war than adults assume, and that wide individual differences exist both in interest exhibited and information possessed (see, for example, Bronte and Musgrove, 1943; Geddie and Hildreth, 1944).

Although this paper will not attempt a full comprehensive survey of research and literature related to children and war, references to a few studies may stimulate further search for pertinent materials by interested parents, teachers and students.

In a now classic study, War and Children (1943), Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingame sought to assess the impact of the Second World War, especially the bombing, on English children. They discussed such disorders as enuresis and juvenile delinquency resulting from wartime stress, One major finding was that separation from parents during evacuation appeared to produce more disturbing effects than the sight of military destruction.

It would seem that children’s consciousness of war varies with world events; they are well aware that people die not only by violent means but as well by accident, illness or old age (see 1951 study by Rautman and Brower of war themes in the stories of elementary school children, comparing essays written during World War II and the Korean War).

In the early sixties, with the increasing threat of nuclear war, a cluster of studies raised questions about the relationship of childhood socialization to adult political beliefs.

Peter Cooper (1965), working with approximately 300 English and 100 Japanese children, aged seven through sixteen, sought to study the children’s stages of thought about war and peace from a framework similar to that of Piaget’s developmental levels. Cooper used open-ended questionnaires and interviews. His findings suggested what he called Schema of Conflict—leading him to hypothesize a transition in the children from early ego-centered assumptions that were essentially optimistic about possibilities of peaceful coexistence to a point where “with developing cognitive skills, usually at the teenage level, a war is related to conceptions of human psychology based upon hostile instinctual drives” (quoted in Torney and Morris, 1972, p. 12). But although Cooper concluded that with age the English children increased their acceptance of and justification for war, they did not appear to modify their much less tangible concepts of peace.

Trond Alvik (1968) shared Cooper’s views that preadolescence (ages eleven to thirteen) is a critically important time in the development of attitudes about war. In Alvik’s own study of Norwegian children he also found, as did investigators in Sweden and West Germany, that children tend to have fewer ideas about peace as an active process than they do about war. He stressed again the strong force of television as a source of information about concrete aspects of war.

In 1961 M. Schwebel undertook a major study of adolescents in junior and senior high schools to determine how they felt about the possibility of war and how they viewed the various measures such as fall-out shelters, designed to protect them in case war erupted. A year later, the same questions were asked during the first week of the Cuban crisis of a new group of 300 secondary-school young people. Surprisingly enough, the students were considerably more optimistic about the prospects for peace than their counterparts had been the year before. The later study also showed increased opposition to shelters. These studies, puzzling as some of the findings are, demonstrated convincingly that these children knew and cared deeply about the consequences of nuclear war. Yet most did not clearly visualize the possibility of their own death. Some of the replies showed resignation or helplessness or efforts to deny fear. The children stressed danger shelters could not cope with. Their great optimism about peace may have come with more open discussion about the issues during the Cuban crisis and awareness of peace-keeping machinery at work.

On the other hand, the reports of Sibylle K. Escalona (1965, 1971), enriched by her exceptional understandings of children’s psycho-social development, indicate less encouraging results. With a group of colleagues, she conducted a questionnaire-study in the early sixties, where in children (from the age of four up to adolescence) were asked what they thought the world would be like by the time they grew up; no mention of war or weapons was made by the researchers. Of the total sample, more than 70 percent spontaneously mentioned nuclear weapons and destructive war as a likely possibility. A relatively large proportion (including even first-, second- and third-graders) expressed pessimism about the future; many spoke of a 50-50 chance of survival. Either “the bomb” would drop, bringing devastating war and death – or a wonderful new world of technology would result. Only a small group expressed hope that their dreams for a positive future might materialize.

More significant than the indication of anxiety was the impoverishing, weakening effect on ego- development in the crucial middle childhood years resulting form viewing the adults in their world as passive, hopeless, powerless victims who were unable to supply needed supports and models of impulse-control.

Other significant studies of children’s attitudes toward political authority have been made by Robert Hess (1963, 1967) and Judith Torney (1967) and by Fred Greenstein (1969). Hess found the most important source of children’s conceptions of authority to be the civic instruction that goes on in ways incidental to normal activities in the family, whereby children overhear parental conversations and either sense or are informally told of parents’ stance toward political authority and public questions.

L. S. Wrightman (1964) investigated by questionnaire the fears of seventy-two seventh- and eighth-grade boys about the chances of war. Later their answers were related to the responses of their parents to similar questions as well as to the boys’ own responses to a variety of measures indicating maladjustment in adolescents. The extent of those children’s fears about the possibility of war was found to be related to how much their parents talked about war, whether parents themselves expected war int he next ten years, and how much these adults worried about its occurring. The fears were not related to the boys’ own aggressiveness, however, or to self-ideal discrepancy or negative views of human nature.

Over a ten-year period W. E. Lambert and Otto Klineberg (1967) interviewed six-, ten-, and fourteen-year-olds from ten different countries concerning the children’s views of foreign peoples. The researchers found that early experiences tend to establish basic predispositions toward one’s own group and foreign peoples, which continue to manifest themselves through out life. Their results demonstrated clearly that the conceptions people develop of their own national group in relation to these may well have long-term consequences. A stereotyping process appears to start very early in the child’s own group and gradually comes to mark certain foreign groups as outstanding examples of people who are different. Children’s attitudes toward foreign peoples were found to vary from one national setting to another, depending upon the techniques used by educators to differentiate their own group from another. Clearly, significant adults in the child’s environment transfer their own emotionally toned views of other peoples to the child at an early age.

In another important cross-national study of childrearing practices, Urie Bronfenbrenner (1970) found current American society segregated by age, race and class. His findings again stressed that television and the child’s peer group acted as prime socializing agencies, with the family becoming less and less prominent to acculturation. To offset the negative consequences of this shift in childrearing responsibilities, Bronfenbrenner suggests several changes from the classroom and the school as well as for the family, the neighborhood and the larger community. He emphasized the significance of modeling, social reinforcement and group processes through which adults involve themselves more deeply in the lives of children. Whether or not we find his solutions too simplistic, he does challenge teachers to see themselves as guides and citizens with important and sustaining responsibility for children.

What Are Implications for Adults?
Although this necessarily brief summary of the development of children’s attitudes indicates some inconsistencies in research-findings, certain implications come clearly forward.

In a society that legitimizes violence in several forms, wherein force is increasingly being used to control behavior, wherein military spending consumes government budgets, wherein competition divides haves and have-nots into armed camps, adults cannot but view with mounting alarm the circumstances in terms of the effects on children.

As an organization for those concerned with the education and well-being of children, the Association for Childhood Education International takes the position that a vital way to prevent war and bring about peace is to raise a generation of children who reject killing as uncivilized and as a barbaric unproductive way to deal with human conflicts.

But education for peace must be viewed as more than simply favoring the absence of war. Developing peace-keeping skills is an active process that involves much more than an extra curriculum unit or vague call for “improvement of international understanding” (Torney and Morris, 1972). Helping children build empathy for others calls for teaching about the world as a dynamic, interrelated, global system.

We have seen that many adults are at best uncomfortable available to children’s questions about conflict- resolution, while their children report that television or radio serves as major sources of information about war. Without in any way denying the crucial role parents can play in value-building, our focus here is on constructive action by teachers.

More and more, teachers are coming to question the traditional stereotyping of maleness an aggression, which insists that the young fighter is “all boy” and that peacemakers somehow lack courage. They are also weighing the arguments about whether a general release of hostility is indeed essential to problem-solving and to mental health (Chisholm, 1956).

Classrooms that prepare peacemakers will have to become laboratories of constructive human relations and critical thinking. Needed for such classrooms are courageous educators who respect children as unique and purposeful human beings living in a society that is constantly in evolution. Rather than attempting to impose specific points of view, such teachers will seek to help children learn to think clearly, analyze penetratingly and challenge fearlessly, so as to be able to face and deal with serious problems far better than to do the present adults.

Where Can Teachers Start?
Thoughtful educators-for-peace explore their own interests and strengths as they develop relationships with other people. Their curiosity inevitably leads to comparisons and pondering about “what if” or “suppose that.” The resulting evaluations of personal experience encourage children to develop skills for negotiation and compromise in decision-making.

They listen to children’s questions and are available for open conversations about what is involved in conflict-resolution. They seek to determine children’s existing attitudes nonjudgmentally, as related to levels of cognitive development. In these ways younger children come to feel safe and older children are reassured about their growing abilities to cope with a complex world.

Teachers who believe in the possibility of a positive future and are willing to work for it are not daunted by controversial issues. They respect the right to dissent and help point up ways to register protests and work for change, while still acknowledging the legitimacy of government. Children need to know that their teachers does not shrink away from confronting difficult issues no matter how painful and confusing concentrated analysis may be. Thereby children can learn that confrontation requires knowledge and wisdom, not just emotionalism and violence.

By way of contrast, other teachers decide to “play it safe”—by diverting a child with a shift in room arrangement, or discouraging verbal communication with a glance, or closing off protest by a regulation, or shortening investigation with a time-limit.

Teachers who want to open up learning about peace for children are themselves constantly involved in learning. They search out new sources of information and seek fresh points of view. Some children learn the physical and psychological trauma of war from direct involvement in its horrors. Others are far from actual scenes of combat yet experience vicariously many critical events. Their teachers also learn by listening to or reading about other people’s experiences and observations.

Both children and teachers are helped to learn together by: While acknowledging the excessive communication of violence on television, they seek to strengthen its potential for communicating concepts of interdependence and consideration of others, as a medium and for encouraging critical thinking in classroom debate.

What the teacher thinks about war is less important than the situations the children choose to analyze; the questions they find pertinent; and the similarities or similarities they perceive between the present and the past, between one national policy and another, or between individual responses to conflict. Keeping children close to real, lifelike situations sharpens their ability to observe objectively and to recognize when they are drawing inferences without sufficient evidence or making value judgments out of limited experience-backgrounds. Given opportunities to discuss their ideas (or to play then out), children confront alternative observations, inferences and value judgments.

Teachers for tomorrow encourage children to respect human life, all human life. In a world that cannot survive another major war and is losing its ability to isolate small wars, no other education is appropriate for our children.

Such teachers know that freedom to think critically and to learn humanistically are essential to education for peace.

Acknowledgments: Special thanks to students of the Elk Grove Unified School District of Sacrament County, California and to teachers Mary Tsukamoto, Jane Lamb, Curtis Wheeler, Betty Pinkerton, and Kit Ouse for their thoughtful, feelingful comments.

References
Alcock, Norman Z. The Emperor’s New Clothes. Oakville, Ontario: Canadian Peace Research Institute Press, 1971.

Alvik, Trond, “The Development of Views on Conflict, Wary and Peace Among School Children: A Norwegian Case Study.” Journal of Peace Research 5 (1968) 171-95.

Bronfenbrenner, Urie, Two Worlds of Childhood: U.S. and U.S.S.R. New York: Russel Sage Foundation. 1970.

Bronte, E. & M. Musgrove, “Influences of War in Children’s Play. Child Development (Winter 1943): 129-200.

Chisholm, Brock. Can People Learn To Learn? London: Allen & Unwin, 1956.

Cooper, Peter. “The Development of the Concept of War.” Journal of Peace Research 2 (1965): 1-17

Escalona, Sibylle K. “Children and the Threat of Nuclear War: in M. Schwebel (ed.), Behavioral Science and Human Survival. Palo Alto: Science and Behavior Books, 1965.

______. The Impact of the Indo-China War upon Personality Development. Address given at Bank Street College of Education, Dec. 1971.

Freud, Anna, and Dorothy Burlingame. War and Children. New York: Ernst Willard. 1943

Geddie, Leanna, & Gertrude Hildreth. “Children’s Ideas About the War.” Journal of Experimental Education (Jan. 1944): 92-97.

Greenstein, Fred I. Children and Politics, rev. ed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969 (Yale Studies in Political Science 13)

Hess, Robert D. “The Socialization of Attitudes Toward Political Authority: Some Cross-national Comparisons.” International Social Science Journal (Nov. 1963): 543-49.

Hess, Robert D., & Judith V. Torney. The Development of Political Attitudes in Children, Chicago: Aldine, 1967.

Lambert, Wallace E., & Otto Klineberg. Children’s Views of Foreign Peoples. New York: Meredith Publishing, 1967.

Rautman, Arthur L., & Edna Brower, “War Themes in Children’s Stories: II.” Journal of Psychology (Apr. 1951): 263-70.

Skard, Aase, “Children and War.” Delta Kappa Gamma Bulletin (Spring 1972): 33-38.

Slater, Philip. The Pursuit of Loneliness. Boston: Beacon, 1970. Tolley, Howard, Jr. Children and War: Political Socialization to International Conflict. New York: Teachers College Press. 1973.

Torney, Judith V., & Donald N. Morris. Global Dimensions in U.S. Education: The Elementary School. New York: The Center for War/Peace Studies. 1972.

Wrightman, L. S. “Parental Attitudes and Behaviors as Determinants of Children’s Responses to the Threat of Nuclear War.” Vita Humana (July 1964): 178-85.

The Association for Childhood Education International would like to thank Norma R. Law for her efforts in preparing this document.

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