No society that feeds its children on tales of successful violence can expect them not to believe that violence in the end is rewarded.
- Margaret Mead, anthropologist (1901-1978)
Margaret Mead was an anthropologist, for heaven's sake. Why should we pay any attention to the opinion of an anthropologist?
Let's work through this together. An anthropologist is a person who studies the history of humankind before any humans recorded their own history. She dug up artifacts of prehistoric humans, then built histories around what their lives must have been like based on the collections she found.
However, the history of prehistoric humans means little unless you know a great deal about recorded history. When you see patterns in that, you can determine if and when similar patterns occurred before history was recorded. You might say that anthropologists are super-masters of human history, both recorded and before.
Margaret Mead knew that ancient societies that taught violence to their children in the form of stories were themselves likely to have an average lifespan for males of fewer than 30 years because many of them would die in wars.
As anyone who attended high school more than a generation ago can testify, historical knowledge focussed on battles and wars more than anything else in the days when Margaret Mead was considered one of the tops in her field.
She knew that if you teach violence and war to children, they will be warriors as adults. "Teaching war" means in story form, just as much teaching today is conveyed through stories. Today we do this through conversations around the kitchen table, through television, video games or movies and with war toys that prime young children before they have any real concept of what war is and the devastation it wreaks.
By simple deduction we can understand that majory concepts such as how adults treat each other may be taught to children who have yet to reach school age, not by classroom-style lessons, but incidentally.
Young children have a great deal to learn in the two decades they are given before they reach adulthood. Before formal lessons begin in school or at home, they must learn by absorbing what adults teach them while the adults think the kids aren't paying any attention.
The main job that children have before they go to school is to absorb as much as they can of what happens around them, then sort through this massive and jumbled mess of information to derive some sense of what the world around them is about.
Children learn concepts easily. It's how they learn everything for their first few years. They learn concepts before they learn facts to support them in many cases.
If we want them to learn the concept of peace, we must teach them peace and show them the ways of peaceful people. We must also give them alternatives to violence and anger when things don't go the way they want with other kids and adults.
If we don't actively and consciously teach peace as a concept to young children, they learn about adults from other sources. Most of those other sources teach them that the world of adults is violent.
In some countries, they also learn about the peaceful ways of their people as they study in school. In other countries, they learn to fear others and that the best (maybe the only) way to deal with fearful strangers is to dominate them or to kill them, if necessary. In school. In history class.
As adults, as parents, grandparents, neighbours and participants in community events, we are role models for children, even children we don't know. Either we actively teach peace or we passively allow children to learn fear and violence.
What if children can't cope with the amount of violence and other ways that adults mistreat each other? What if they have moral dilemmas about it? What if they see hypocrisy about violence and can't sort it through in their heads?
Not to worry. There are lots of distractions such as drugs, crime and even mental illnesses that they can resort to.
Every day of our lives we adults pay out of our pockets huge amounts of money to support adults who were once children who could not cope with the circumstances of their lives.
Failure to teach what children need to know costs us dearly.
Bill Allin
Turning it Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, striving to put coping tools into the hands of children before they get their lives wrenched out of shape.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
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Comments: 24
Assuming you are correct, I guess we should do everything we can to keep our kids from being exposed to any of those disturbing accounts of warfare, violence and conflict you find so objectionable. Which one should we burn first--the Aeneid or the Bible?
Both the Aeneid and the Bible are very violent books, as is the Quran in parts. If the shoe fits...
As to preventing kids of reading or learning anything about stories of war or violence, that is a painfully simplistic response. That is a cop-out from doing real teaching. Expose kids to everything, then use the opportunities to treach right from wrong. To say that we should keep something from kids, as I infer from what you said, means that you want to keep them ignorant. That doesn't work. It only makes them hate adults more because of their hypocrisy, once they find out the truth about these respected but violent stories.
Nothing good every comes from being ignorant or from keeping children ignorant. Teach them everything. It's what adults are supposed to do.
Debra, I'm not convinced we are trying to play God or be godly. I think we are following the teaching of the Bible where it says that humans should dominate (hold dominion over) the land and everything on it. As we were taught, so we are.
Joe, it's an enormous responsibility, yet one that is very easy to fulfill. Talking with kids is not hard. They are interested in anything that adults have to teach them about their world.
So long as we don't teach kids anything different, they become what the wills of those with money to invest want them to be.
Are you aware that more and more people are referring to the "ruling class" in the US? Do average citizens know about this and are they offended?
I am concerned about this because the US sounds increasingly like Germany in the late 1920s and early 1930s.
Canada has two main political parties, one just slightly to the left of centre and the other just slightly to the right. The US used to have similar party stances, as recently as the time of Bill Clinton. However, the Republicans have polarized the two parties by some wizardry, so that now the Democrats are not a desirable alternative to the Republicans.
38 states have Canada as their largest export market. Canadian investment in the US is so great that there isn't a US state that doesn't have Canadian money in there somewhere keeping US citizens employed. Those arrangements are potentially at risk if the Democrats take over Congress this month and the presidency in two years time.
If the Democrats make the massive changes that some Canadians expect, Canada will turn elsewhere, such as to the EU, Japan, China and India. The US will isolate itself further (as it is doing now by having military controls along the formerly world's longest undefended border), drawing inward. Sectarian name-calling will turn violent, with Republican and Democratic gangs making Watergate look like a kindergarten party. This is one possible scenario, which would have the Middle East an inferno as a religious war erupts between the Sunnis and the Shi'ites, beginning in Iraq.
The Democrats need another Bill Clinton to bring them back to centre. Even Hilary doesn't know wha't going on fully. She announced not long ago that the 9/11 terrorists made their way across the border from Canada (none of them did--they were all US immigrants who came directly from Middle Eastern countries). You expect that from Newt, who is dangling from the extreme edge of the right wing.
So far the Democrats have no one who could pull the US out of its steep decline.
There is no historic precedent for a great empire crashing and burning within one lifetime (except the Incas, but that is another story).
If history is repeating itself, then it's on fast forward. The Cuban missile crisis was a carnival ride compared to this. That was a charade, while this current situation is very real.
Even JFK would never make it today to become leader of the Democratic Party.
There is more to life than Pro-Iraq and Anti-Iraq. There really is.
Now I'm going to laugh here. Better that than to scream and tear out the rest of my hair.
Where is your Nehru? Where is your voice of calm and reasoned choices?
Where is someone who wants peace? You have been taught war constantly for six years and you have all come to believe that everyone is your enemy. At least the US acts that way.
Teach peace, not political differences. People want peace. US citizens are ready for peace as a prime objective, I believe. It's a concept that Bush doesn't understand, nor do any of today's top Republicans (the more moderate ones have been forced out of power).
Peace can be offered as a parenting course curriculum item, Debbie. It's part of the whole program laid out in 'Turning It Around'. (See my web site at
http://billalllin.com for more about this, including several articles and a few chapters from the book.)
Ignorance and lack of education are the breeding grounds for followership.
The Iraq war wasn't about Iraq's oil, but about the fortunes that US oil companies could make selling oil to the US military in Iraq. General Motors became the world's largest auto maker because of the fortune it made selling vehicles to Allied forces during the Second World War.
You may think that the US would likely be better with another Republican ruler. But remember that over 90 percent of US media outlets are owned by very conservative Republicans. They have the power to work on people's minds every day. Of course, Joe McCarthy did that and his bubble eventually burst, though he took a lot of innocent people down with him.
Debra, I believe that Prescott Bush was a US senator when his financing of Hitler was publicised openly, a few years after the war. He resigned, but that was the end of his punishment.
Every war is financed by banks. Wars could not happen without banks. Guess which country has the most banks that finance weapon purchases for both sides of almost every war that has happened in the past half century.
"We are not in control of our Country" is a cop-out. You have a vote, as does every citizen. The problem is ignorance on a massive scale. American don't just know little and care less about the people of other countries, they know little about their own country.
Ignorance brings terrible tragedy.
I want to change that. I have the method and the plan, but I need to spread the word.
They believe in "can't" so long as there is no one to tell them that they can.
So tell them.
Or give me the opportunity to tell them.
I must leave this thread now because...you know...dial up delay.
Thanks to all who participated in this topic.