The David Gribble Archive : Talks

Children don’t start wars

Leipzig University, 2008
EUDEC (European Democratic Education Converence)
Page 1

I’m going to talk about an idea that I had for the first time when I was about twenty years old, and then forgot until about fifteen years ago. The idea is controversial, so I shall approach it cautiously, starting with facts that are generally accepted.

I have divided the talk into five sections, as follows:
First section: You get less good at certain things as you get older
Second section: A bit about theories of moral development
Third section: How I came to hold my present views
Fourth section: Adult behaviour
Fifth section: A way forward
And a conclusion.

1. You get worse at certain things as you get older.

(a) Physically, it is obvious that after 40 or so we can’t run so fast, we can’t jump so high. The people we sent to compete in the athletic events in the Olympic Games are mostly younger than thirty. And after fifty we can’t hear so well, and we may have to wear glasses.

But the deterioration starts much earlier than most of us realise. Young children hear much higher sounds than older children or adults. I have taken part in an experiment in which a science teacher played a computer-generated sound that started extremely high and gradually came lower and lower. Everyone in the room was asked to put up a hand as soon as they heard anything. The youngest hands went up first – eleven-year-olds. Then more hands went up until all hands were raised except those of the few teachers present. After a few more seconds, teachers’ hands began to go up, and I could still hear absolutely nothing. Then, quite a long time after the last teacher, who was fifteen years younger than I was, I heard the sound, suddenly, loud and clear. It didn’t become slowly louder – first it wasn’t there at all, and then it was loud.

Young children’s injuries heal much faster than older people’s. The accommodation of the lens of the eye begins to deteriorate from the age of 5. The pupil of the eye gets smaller, and I read in the paper the other day that sixty-year-olds see only about a third as much light as twenty-year-olds. And so on.

(b) Mental deterioration is also obvious by the time you reach my age. We become absent-minded, we forget names and faces, we lose the ability to do more than one thing at a time.