Well, the less you tell them about it, the more likely it will be that they see war as a game. The point is to teach kids things based on their level of understanding. My 8yo is still in good guys/bad guys mode. My 10yo is not, and we can talk about why bad things happen. But she had to get through the earlier stage to get to the later one, and she has to get through the ‘why?’ stage to get to the more mature one of having real thoughts and expressing them. She can’t just skip those earlier stages of development.
Hmmmm… the last I remember, here in the US, we are currently engaged in two wars, the details of which are regularly reported in the media. Unless a child is significantly sheltered then she already knows about war. Therefore teaching her about war and the military is a good idea.
I agree, and this is essentially the problem. Too many people have never been told enough of the truth.
I agree. But I’m not sure that there’s any honest approach to certain subjects within the understanding of even a very smart and mature seven-year-old.
The facts and figures yes, but as soon as you start explaining the whys and wherefores you’re into interpretation and well… opinion.
You can try and be unbiased… which I’d hope people were as much as possible.
Preach => choir. 
But my point was just that many people, I’d even wager most people, think that it’s perfectly OK to teach ones kids about religion in a very biased fashion.
Side-jack… great, so ideally (per your argument) I shouldn’t teach my child about religion except to say “Some people think this, others think that” without injecting my own opinion? Yeah… that’s not going to work; it puts his education into the hands of whichever biased and unreasonable person can shout loudest. (Hmm… this is a sore point with me who has been trying hard not to present a biased opinion to my son on this, only to find that his school has prayers – albeit in Maori as karakia – and that the existence of god-capital-G is a given and something he’s absorbed from his school surroundings…)
So I shouldn’t try to teach him why stealing is wrong? Interesting parenting techniques you’re suggesting.
The same is true of a depressing number of adults.
Agreed, but the age at which they begin developing this is about kindergarten age.
I really think children should be taught, as soon as possible, that war should be the *last *resort. We glorify it too much, in my opinion.
Touching on the subject of bias in education probably requires a whole thread on its own. I work in a military museum, and we have groups of kids as young as six or seven come in for tours. When I speak to the kids my favorite thing to talk about is medical care during the American Civil War. I do have to change how I explain a concept to them. For example, I always ask a group of third graders if they know what an amputation is but I never ask high school kids the same question. I touch on diseases, hygiene and I don’t shy away from death though I spare the younger kids any gory details. (I’ve gotten some dirty looks from teachers and parents when I go through the steps of a Civil War amputation but most of the kids seem to enjoy it. Especially when I get out the trepanning tool.)
Refusing to broach a topic with a child because it’s complex is simply silly. They might not understand everything at the time you tell them but as they grow older they’ll remember some of what they learned and start putting the pieces together. By the time I was five or six I knew what a war was and I knew that people killed each other in them. I won’t say I had a particularly nuanced understanding of armed conflict but it wasn’t a foreign concept to me.
You should give your kids more credit. It’s true, they won’t have a particularly nuanced view of warfare but they won’t have a particularly nuanced view of the American political system, the settlement of the west in the latter half of the 19th century or even the industrial revolution. However, teaching them about these things lays the foundation for future exploration of the topic.
You could be right.
It’s not as if I’ve avoided giving answers involving war when called upon, but I haven’t encouraged an interest as with a lot of other interests.
So you don’t really want to teach history-you want to teach propaganda.
When my son was in second grade he had a class project where everyone in the room had to pick a job and read a book about it. Then they had a “job day” where everyone dressed up as their job and gave a report to the parents as they came and visited the classroom.
My son picked “soldier” as his job.
Do you have any idea how hard it is to find a book on being a soldier that’s appropriate for an 8-year-old? Eventually we gave up looking for one, and I wrote one myself – about 2000 words at a second grade level on the job of a solider.
Here’s how it starts:
Is this a simplification? Absolutely. Do I gloss over the specifics of the horrors of war? Yes. Does this present MY view of what a soldier SHOULD do? Guilty as charged.
My goal wasn’t to tell him everything about war in one big lump. My goal was to give him a framework for thinking about war that was appropriate for an 8-year-old. He’s thirteen now and he knows a lot more. He had a report on the Civil War this spring and we spent a lot of time talking about the horrors of Civil War battlefields. We found photos online of the bodies after Gettysburg and talked about why changing technology had made war more brutal. My wife and I talk politics in front of our kids all the time. We’re both big lefties, so he’s getting a hefty dose of reasons why our current war on terror is stupid (and often evil).
War is like sex. If you’re not teaching your kids about it, they’re going to learn about it from somewhere else. And the lessons they learn may not be very good ones.
Exactly.
Try as you might to “teach without bias,” there is bias in everything. If you don’t teach anything you can’t teach without bias, then you won’t teach your kids anything, and they are little learning machines that want to learn about the world–if you don’t teach them, MTV and McDonald’s will be happy to do the job.
Your book sounds neat, Hamster King!
Walter Reed was a doctor who studied a disease called yellow fever that was killing a large number of US soldiers. His work lead to big advancements in the study of bugs and how they carry diseases.
Or was tht too much for you to understand?
When you explain what a proxy war is to her. Then the difference between unconventional and conventional warfare, asymmetric warfare, total war, rules of engagement, the difference between strategy and tactics. Good luck!
I’ve explained all these things to my kids. For example, a few weeks ago I had a discussion on the way to school with my 11-year-old daughter about why the British and American forces used different tactics in the Revolutionary War. (She’s been keenly interested in the Revolution since she played Roger Sherman in a school play last year.) The “Soldiering for 2nd Graders” book I mentioned above has a section on the rules of war: How soldiers are supposed to treat prisoners and civilians, what sorts of weapons they’re allowed to use, etc. We’ve talked about how one of the horrible things about a war like Afghanistan is that it’s hard to tell who’s an enemy and who’s a bystander, so innocent people wind up getting killed. None of this stuff is particularly hard to explain.
I don’t understand why we wouldn’t.
Yeah, I sometimes have seven-year-olds so full of themselves that they try to condescend to me, too, unaware of how ignorant it makes them look.
To be fair, I chose the worst possible example out of that set; indeed, in our recent project, we did have Mary Jane Seacole, who’s famous to a large degree for her nursing work with soldiers. So mea culpa.
Indeed, our parameters for the project is that it had to be someone from Europe, South America, Africa, or Asia whose career changed the world for the better. People whose changes were minor (sports stars, inventors of video-games) were okay, but people whose changes were mixed weren’t. We nixed military people because we already had a ton of great people from Europe, and because we had real trouble coming up with any military leaders from South America, Africa, or Asia whom we could say had unambiguously made the world a better place.
I do talk about wars with my students, and I think I’ve already offered examples of how I do that. I’m willing to let some bias through: this morning when I was talking about the metric system with students, I showed them on Google earth the two countries besides the US that use the imperial system, and when discussing Burma I gave them the thirty-second version of “The Burmese government sucks” speech. But in the particular project that was the subject of the other thread, there were no military people who seemed appropriate.
If someone can give an example of a military person from South America, Asia, or Africa whose actions were as unambiguously positive and as easy to explain to a second grader as Queen Raniah, Pele, or Wangari Maathai, I’ll be interested to hear it. I’m unfamiliar with any such figure
How about Simon Bolivar (South America)? 60 second summary for second graders -
He attempted to create a “united states of south america”, to free the continent from its colonial masters, but while he was able to win battles against the Spanish he could not control such a vast territory filled with different peoples and make of it a united country, and died a disappointed man - saying that he had attempted to “plough the sea”. [Here you can explain what he meant by that - he’d attempted an impossible task that would leave no trace after he’d gone]
He was very much like a South American George Washington, but he differed in three very important respects:
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He always oppossed slavery;
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He did not think that a democratic system could work right away in South America, and attempted to rule as a dictator until the time was ripe for democracy; and
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Ultimately, while he succeeded in driving out the Spanish, he failed in creating a united states of south america.
Nonetheless, the south Americans greatly revere him to this day, and the country of “Bolivia” is named after him.
Bolivar could’ve worked. I’m not sure why we didn’t consider him, honestly–we considered Pancho Villa. Maybe we did consider him and rejected him, and I forgot: did he have any ugly massacres to his name or something?
Edit: just read up on him. He tried to have a president-for-life system embedded in the constitution and had himself declared dictator. I’m not sure that qualifies as unambiguously positive change in the mold of Gandhi or Queen Rania.
How exactly is being a dictator-for-life worse than being a Queen?
I don’t see that this ought to disqualify him - he remained committed to democracy (eventually), he simply dispaired of it working in the SA he knew during his revolution.
One person wrote the laws and wrote himself into the laws that way; another person simply works within a pre-existing (admittedly unfair) structure to do good. And I’m unconvinced that a commitment to democracy (eventually) is sufficient; after all, Lenin was committed to a system even better than democracy (eventually). It’s what someone does in the here-and-now that matters.