The David Gribble Archive : Talks

Children don’t start wars

Leipzig University, 2008
Page 8

4. The walls that adults build

We don’t like children to watch the horrors on the news because, we say, it affects them too strongly. We feel we can take it, but what this actually means is that we are able to ignore it. It is only as adults that we are able to turn our backs on huge differences in wealth, starvation in the third world, the risk of nuclear war, the prospect of climate change. When we say that we don’t want children to have to face such prospects we are actually protecting ourselves from the perfectly rational distress and fear that younger people have not yet learned to suppress.

An eleven-year-old girl at Caol Primary School in Scotland, Jodie Fraser, was ill a home on 9.11 when the twin towers in New York were attacked. She watched it on television, and when she got back to school she went up to the school’s famous art room, Room 13, and created a work of art. She took a big canvas and scattered over it 3000 burnt matchsticks, one for each person who had died, and then sprayed it with gray paint for smoke. It is an extremely impressive work, and has been exhibited in many different galleries in the UK, including Tate Modern, the main modern art museum in London. Jodie Fraser, eleven years old at the time, said, “I wanted to do a painting that would make people cry.”

Most of us adults do not cry about current events, however awful they are.

But it is not only the huge but usually remote issues of war and famine and natural disaster that we hide from. We actually avoid facing the evil that is being done all the time by adults within our own societies. Children are blamed for what they do to others, but adults are hardly ever blamed for what they do to children. In Britain about two children a week are killed by their parents or carers, but it does not reach the news. When one teen-ager is killed in a gang fight, there are cries of indignation about the wickedness of young people in general these days. When adults are to blame, only stories with a kind of perverse extravagance, like the underground punishment rooms in the children’s home in Jersey, or the extraordinary story of Josef Fritzl in Austria actually reach the papers.

Jesper Juul, the Danish family therapist, says:

“In relationships between children and adults, adults are always responsible when violence erupts. This does not just apply to those cases in which the adults use violence, but also to those in which children or young people behave violently toward their parents, brothers and sisters, friends, and strangers, and to property belonging to their immediate family or to other people.
. . .
Partly as a result of the liberalization of society and the increasing self-awareness among children and young people, a terrifying number of them express their pain publicly and destructively. This development will continue until we begin to assume responsibility for the massive violence, both physical and psychological, that adults still express toward children.”

Most of the evil in the world is perpetrated by adults, and we have all been trained to accept this as perfectly normal. It is difficult not to perpetuate the situation by training our own children to accept it too. We are inclined stress the importance of conforming and obeying rules rather than allowing our natural altruism to express itself. Both at home and at school children are often punished for not conforming. They learn to distrust people who are different. We lie to them “to protect them from disagreeable truths” and then we train them as soldiers and send them out to kill and be killed for the sake of something they do not understand.

People object, with good reason, to children forming gangs, but when we become grown-ups, we all tend to identify with groups. These may be, for instance, the firms we work for, the teams we belong to, the political parties we support, a trades union or a simply a group of friends we went to school with. The more we identify with a group, the less we rely on our own innate altruism.

We learn to be more loyal to our institutions than our own moral impulses. A glaring example is big business. Small businesses are usually run to fulfil a need, because unless there is a need there will be no business. Then sometimes they grow into huge conglomerates which are run by people whose primary purpose is not to fulfil a need or even to provide meaningful employment for other people, but merely to maximise profits for shareholders and executives. When the executives take action which damages the lives of others, they give as justification the argument that they are morally obliged to do it in order to maximise profits for shareholders.

Whether they are big or small, we serve our institutions automatically, without being aware of what we are doing. Our moral development is halted, as Peck and Havighurst suggested, in the stages of conformity and irrational conscientiousness. As Mary Douglas says in her book, How Institutions Think,

"The highest triumph of institutional thinking is to render the institution completely invisible."

5. A way forward

In explaining the title of his book, The Competent Child, Jesper Juul says this:

“When I say that children are competent, I mean they are in a position to teach us what we need to learn. They give us the feedback that makes it possible for us to regain our own lost competence and help us to discard our unfruitful, unloving and self-destructive patterns of behaviour. To learn from our children in this way demands much more than that we speak democratically with them. It means that we must develop a kind of dialogue that many adults are unable to establish even with other adults: that is to say, a personal dialogue based on equal dignity.”

In democratic education that is what we try to achieve. Democratic schools show the way that the crystallised intelligence of older people can be married to the fluid intelligence of the young, without conflict. It gives young people the opportunity to grow without abandoning their fundamental moral concerns. Even though in democratic schools there is sometimes a tendency to fall back on a morality of rules rather than relying on a morality of care, young people are always accepted for what they are and respected as individuals.

By way of illustration here are three quotations from ex-pupils of Sudbury Valley School. At the end of their time at Sudbury, students who want to receive a diploma have to present a thesis to demonstrate that they are able to go out into the big wide world and lead responsible lives without the support of the school. These quotations are taken from such theses by young people who had come to SVS to escape from conventional education, which they had come to find intolerable.

The place was gorgeous and the people there talked to me like I had never been talked to before. They talked to me as if I was a responsible individual. I was thrilled.

Leaving school is very difficult for me because it's been one of the only dependable things I've ever known. I've always been able to come here, and there isn't any fear here. There's nothing to run from here, in fact this is where I've always run to, but being a student here just takes too much time and as much as I'd like to spend the rest of my life in a small isolated community with nothing to be afraid of, there are things going on in the outside world that scare me, and I feel I have to give priority to changing them.

And the third quotation comes from a thesis-writer who described his time at Sudbury Valley as a rebirth. He told of the many different activities he had taken part in, and ended like this:

While this was going on, I was learning; learning about people, learning how to interact. I didn't really start to learn these things until I came to Sudbury Valley School. Actually, that's not true. It was more like relearning something that I used to know.

I think we are all capable of re-learning what we used to know, just as I re-learnt at the age of fifty-five what I had known at the age of twenty. If we remember our young selves with the respect they deserve, we can extend that respect to other young people, and learn from them.

As Jesper Juul says, in the passage I have already quoted,

“Children are in a position to teach us what we need to learn.”

This has implications far beyond the family and the school. I shall give just two examples.

CWC stands for The Concerned for Working Children. It is in Karnataka, India, and has recently been working to increase the influence children can have on local government. Here are some extracts from their report about the first set of children’s public meetings in 2007.

The reports from the first set of Children’s Grama Sabhas 2007 stand testimony to how a well-facilitated process of Children’s Grama Sabhas not only holds the local government accountable to children and ensures their commitment to children’s rights, but also has a powerful impact on strengthening local governance.

In Halli Hole the Panchayat (local council) reported to a meeting of several hundred children about the successful implementation of nineteen programmes that were a direct result of the issues raised by children during Children’s Grama Sabha in 2006. These include the construction of toilets in schools and improved access to basic facilities and services, not only for children, but for the entire community. The President of the Panchayat, Shankar Narayan Chatra, said, “It is now absolutely clear to me why children’s participation is essential to strengthen local governments. Children do not only list their problems, they also describe the implications of the problems and the importance of addressing them. This has been extremely useful to us to develop our action plans.”

The children’s participation had started with research organised by CWC . They identified problems and followed this up with extensive research. CWC published a guide to the way in which children and adults can co-operate in such activities, and this illustrates what could be done in any number of other contexts. A few quotations:

• Children must have absolute control over the research process. Adults must not interfere or attempt to dominate it.
• Children are quite capable of setting the agenda, designing processes and implementing the research. However, adults also have a specific and strategic role to play, as facilitators of the process. It is very important for us adults to recognise when we need to make observations and offer guidance – and when not to. The experience of CWC clearly shows that the primary role of adults is to provide children with information and skills.
• Enabling children’s participation does not mean letting go of the entire process and leaving children to fend for themselves. In a healthy adult-child partnership there is possibility for negotiation.
• The children who collect/generate information must have complete ownership over that information. They can decide what to do with it. The adult facilitators should ask the children's permission to use any information they have generated.

The second example is Porsgrumm, in Norway. This was one of the rare situations in which children have been able to influence adult decision-making.

In Porsgrumm the three industries on which the town depended had all collapsed at more or less the same time and the population were largely unemployed, depressed and pessimistic. The young people wanted to move away. The local council invited children to join all its committees and listened to what they had to say. Within a year or two the whole atmosphere had changed and people of Porsgrumm were once again proud to live there.

The curious and discouraging aspect of the story is that the very last committee to accept the advice of children was the committee for education. The people who should be closest to the children and best able to appreciate their contributions, often seem to see it as their responsibility principally to keep them under control.

Conclusion

In 1999 I visited the Doctor Albizu Campos Puerto Rican High School in Chicago, in an area where the gang culture was dominant. The school was doing a lot to improve the status of the Puerto Ricans in Chicago, but that is not what I want to talk about now. I would like to tell you what a nineteen-year-old former gang member told me there about the corrupting effect of age and power. It can serve as a summary of all I have been talking about.

"The old ones," he said, "is what you call the OGs, they call them original gangsters. In a gang once you pass the limit of twenty-one you become one of the big-heads, you become like wiser, you're no more use to them because you're already old. To them you're old, you know, you can't be a soldier no more. Mainly the soldiers are all young people, I mean eleven, twelve, thirteen, real young kids that are all out there killing each other over a street that doesn't even belong to them. They're fighting over things that they don't even know what they're really fighting for. They don't know the meaning of the fight that they do, you know, the struggles that are happening to them. It's bad, because I see all these shorties dying over things that they don't even know about. . . And mainly what I don't understand is that all that violence is going on while the heads of every single gang is always smoking with each other, with all the heads, they're always having sessions and making business with each other, while youngsters are out there killing each other and everything."

The children are used by the OGs in the same way as governments use young men. In national wars of aggression it is the twenty-year-olds who are sent out to kill one another while the middle-aged or elderly politicians stay safely at home, supported by middle-aged or elderly business-people who make money out of it. War is an extreme example of older people leading younger people into immorality.

Children don't start wars. Adults do.

Bibliography
The Concerned for Working Children, Children hold local governments accountable: CWC press release, 2007
Douglas, Mary, How Institutions think: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987
Gilligan, Carol: In a Different Voice: Harvard University Press, 1982
Gopnik, Alison, Meltzoff Andrew and Kuhl, Patricia, How Babies Think: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1999
Gussin Paley, Vivian, Wally’s Stories: Harvard University Press, 1994
Juul, Jesper, Your Competent Child: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2001
Lolichen, P. J. , Children in the Driver’s Seat: CWC, 2005
Peck R. F. and Havighurst, R. J., Paley, The Psychology of Character Development: Wiley, 1960
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