The latest war is on, like background music, on TVs and radios in all corners of the world. It’s high drama, reality TV with enough fly-encrusted corpses to turn the head of even the most dumbed-down couch potato.
I’m not one who can watch it for long. I soon find myself scowling with the effort to trace my way through the vulgar (and not-so-vulgar) propaganda towards a clear, balanced picture of what on earth’s going on.
All that’s ultimately clear to me is that, in this Big Boy game of international war, the slipping notions of right and wrong are not nearly as important as the incalculable impact the conflict is having on ordinary folk.
For those living in Iraq, this can be no more than an intensification of the hardships and loss they have endured since the Gulf War in 1991. The education system, for one, is in tatters: there have been no new textbooks since 1989 and everything from chalk to toilets is in short supply. A recent Unicef report states that ‘70% of Iraqi schools are in dire need of renovation and repair and many of them pose health hazards to the students”.
It seems likely that the figure will soon reach 99%, as the United States-led forces let loose their might.
But it’s not only Iraqi education that must be reeling afresh. What of schools in the ‘land of the free and the home of the brave’ – in the US? How is the fact that their country is at war effecting their children’s education?
Doubtless their classrooms are intact, textbooks and teachers as always in sweet supply. But you have to wonder: how is this war being presented to the country’s youngest? Are notions of critical thinking and objectivity, justice and history, being trashed at schools as teachers take on the role of patriotic supporters?
A resolution passed by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) — the second largest teachers’ union, representing about 800 000 members — is one indication that this is the case. The resolution ‘strongly supported American and international efforts to disarm Saddam Hussein”, in keeping, said AFT president Sandra Feldman, with ‘the union’s long history of supporting democratic movements”.
But not all educators are toeing the patriotic line. One who is not is Leah C Wells, a teacher based in California. She has been involved in the most remarkable project: a pen-pal initiative between her own students and those of a boys’ school outside Baghdad. Wells has written of the ‘powerful exercise in empathy” that this experience has been for her learners. She may describe Hussein as a cruel dictator but above all her concern is with the millions of innocents whose fate it may be to become the conflict’s unnumbered victims.
The voice of one Iraqi child called Fahad calls out so simply through all this madness. In his letter to his American pen-pal, Fahad writes: ‘All people in the world must not believe everything bad said about us in programs made ‘specially to produce bad facts about Iraq.”
He is asking us to keep our critical faculties sharp in these heady days. It’s simple: people are living there.