In the fall of 1982 the leaders of the nuclear-freeze movement, still buoyed by what they considered a popular tide, introduced to America's schools the subject of nuclear war, and what they judged fit to prevent it. Assisted by grants from foundations large and small, obscure and famous, educators for the freeze wrote curriculum guides inviting teachers to make this new subject formally a part of their schedule. Some public grumbling was heard when the National Education Association (NEA) in 1983 published Choices: A Unit on Conflict and Nuclear War, but then the matter sank from sight as other issues displaced the brief attention provoked by the advent of a new school subject.

Although the nuclear-freeze campaign has faded, it should not be imagined that the schools have abandoned “peace education,” “peace studies,” or “nuclear war education.” Some fifty teaching guides now exist, all managing to fit into a very thin slice of the political spectrum. The two organizations with clear ascendancy in the field are the 1.7 million-member NEA, the largest labor union in America, and Educators for Social Responsibility (ESR). Not content to let the spread of the new curriculum depend on teacher initiative alone, these groups have succeeded in convincing states such as Oregon, and municipalities from New York and Milwaukee to Pittsburgh and Los Angeles, to require legally that “peace” or “nuclear war” education be made part of the short list of subjects which all children must study.

A closer look at the three most widely used curricular guides, Choices, Dialogue, and Perspectives, is therefore in order.

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I

A teaching unit for junior-high-school students written for the NEA by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), Choices opens with a justification by John Mack, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard who has made no secret of his desire to change America's defense policy. This desire he readily combines with his professional interest in children:

Young, and even very young, children are telling their parents and teachers that they are afraid of dying in a nuclear war. In the past, we have been poorly informed and ill-equipped to respond to these fears and have offered little to young people outside of unconvincing reassurances. This history of silence and ignorance in too many American classrooms is now being overcome, as pioneering curricula on the subject of nuclear war are being introduced in high schools and junior high schools throughout the country.

Dr. Mack goes on to say that “recent studies demonstrate that the nuclear arms race and the experience of living with the threat of nuclear annihilation have had a significantly adverse impact on the emotional lives of young people.” In fact, however, as Joseph Adelson and Chester E. Finn, Jr. have shown,¹ such studies for the most part have been produced by amateurs in the field of survey work, and, even when not, they have combined methodological shoddiness with overt political purpose.

As any parent knows, fear is an emotion communicated very readily from adult to child. One would therefore expect evidence far better than that hastily adduced by politically active psychiatrists claiming that children are in a state of terror about nuclear weapons, lest the treatment prove iatrogenic and the fears to be allayed become the effect of the therapy that is applied. Yet teachers sensitive to this consideration, or who might in any case question the propriety of using the classroom to communicate their private fears about the world to children, are told by the authors of Choices: “It is also important for you to admit your fears about nuclear war. This may help students more freely admit their own fears.”

Lesson 1 of Choices begins by distributing to students a picture of a mushroom cloud. The children are asked what it means to them. This is followed by “The First Atomic Bomb,” where the teacher is to “read one factual and one personal account of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.” The “factual” account gives no background to World War II, and does not even mention who started it. The “personal account” includes a child's description of the Hiroshima devastation. Then, lest the horror of it all be too hastily absorbed, the next steps are these:

2. Divide the class into groups of four to five students.

3. Ask students to discuss their feelings about the Hiroshima accounts.

4. Have the groups list three or four things they felt after hearing these accounts.

5. Ask a spokesperson from each group to present the group's list to the class.

6. Allow students time to discuss their thoughts and feelings about Hiroshima and the atomic bomb.

Further optional exercises, with the class still divided into intimate groups, include distributing “pictures drawn by atomic-bomb survivors 30 years after the event,” from the book Unforgettable Fire, with the same extended ritual as above, and again concluding, “Allow students time to discuss their thoughts and feelings about Hiroshima and the atomic bomb.”

Whatever else their state of ignorance these days, it can scarcely be argued that junior-high-school students do not know that atomic bombs kill people. Given the absence of any context to explain the extremely limited choices imposed by conditions of war in general, and the war waged against the Japanese in particular, these class exercises devised by the Union of Concerned Scientists, which single out from the great lexicon of the war's documented horrors but one sort committed by one side, can only produce in thirteen-year-olds the reactions that UCS surely intends: pity for the Japanese, disgust for America.

The same theme is resumed in Lesson 4 under “Effects of Nuclear Explosions,” this time with radiation sickness added to the catalogue of human and material destruction. First, teachers are told to “Ask students to review from Lesson 1 the effects of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. This discussion gives an introduction to the nature and effects of nuclear weapons.” The review completed, the students are to read about radiation sickness “and then discuss the long-term effects on those who are not immediately killed by the explosion.” Teachers who might hesitate, at this point, have their resolve strengthened by the UCS: “This part of the lesson may be one of the most disturbing portions of the unit. The students have been given many unpleasant facts, but it is crucial to realize the destructive nature of nuclear weapons.” The next message gets repeated at intervals: “Though the first atomic bomb was much smaller than today's nuclear weapons, and therefore does not give a true picture of the extent of destructive capacity, we will use the memories of atomic-bomb survivors to educate ourselves and students about an event we hope to prevent from ever happening again.” Students are encouraged to start a private journal in which they may record and elaborate their new-found fears, sense of national guilt, and convictions of how the world in consequence must be changed.

To ensure that sorrow and guilt not distract from the primary emotion of fear, the Union of Concerned Scientists recommends “Ground Zero,” an exercise that permits the children to “detail the effects of a one-megaton bomb at different distances” from “the point on the earth's surface on or above which a nuclear weapon explodes,” with concentric circles to distinguish varying effects on humans and property. “Provide students with copies of a map or show an overhead projection of their city. . . . You may choose to have students draw the concentric circles on the maps. If so, they will need compasses.” Etc. The authors of Choices, as one can see, cannot be faulted for a lack of thoroughness.

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The designers of this manual are aware, however, that to construct a whole philosophy of disarmament, more than raw fear and guilt are needed. Broader issues of human relations—economics, the nature of conflict, a general picture of the world—must also be introduced and taught. Thus, among possible explanations of why the West has an adversary relationship with the Soviet Union, there are two that enjoy prominence in Choices, as in all the “peace” curricula. The first is that we Americans have a primitive tendency to imagine people who are different from ourselves as our “enemies.” Our problem, in a word, is psychological. The second, more hard-headed explanation is that nations, like individuals, are unduly selfish, and refuse to share equally with others their goods and resources; war, in this view, is but the end product of “competitiveness,” resulting from the institution of private property.

The UCS offers exercises by which to drive these lessons home. The start of Lesson 2 (“Personal Conflict”) presents the psychological thesis: “Whether our opponent is perceived as a friend, enemy, or stranger may produce very different resolutions to the conflict.” This prepares students for the assertion that our difficulty with the Soviets is essentially a problem in our heads. And the analogies students are asked to entertain are sufficiently trivial to support this claim.

For instance, in selecting personal conflicts to illustrate the harsher realities of the world, the authors of Choices might have examined the situation created, say, by a bully demanding another child's lunch money under threat of violence (a not uncommon occurrence these days). Instead, the situations favored by Choices run from borrowing another's bike without asking permission, to stepping ahead in line; the exercise is then to imagine how events would evolve if you “assume that the other person is your friend,” or “your enemy,” or, finally, “a stranger.” Choices guides the teacher: “Does assuming the other person is an enemy produce the same result as assuming your opponent is a friend? Does eliminating a ‘me vs. you’ attitude help resolve conflicts?”

The idea that nothing very serious (other than American cultural prejudice) separates the United States and the Soviet Union is the basis of the “U.S.-USSR Fact Sheet,” which informs students that the USSR has 270 million people, a harsh climate in the east, important reserves of minerals, and “some unfriendly countries” on its frontiers, due—among other provocations—to the presence along one border of “as many as 1 million Chinese troops.” By contrast, through some circumstance of good luck, “The United States is bordered on the north by Canada and on the south by Mexico, both friendly countries.” The U.S. also has not suffered nearly so much from war, having lost only about a million men in battle since its birth, whereas “the Soviet Union lost about 20 million people in World War II in addition to about 11 million in World War I and the Civil War of 1918.”

Oddly enough, in this summary of Soviet suffering, the UCS seems to have overlooked one of the most sensational statistics of the century—the number of Soviet citizens done to death by their own rulers. Admittedly, such a statistic of social genocide—even the mere mention of the Gulag—might interfere with the purpose of Lesson 2, which is to show that our dislike of the Soviet system and leadership is merely mental and that it proceeds from a lack of familiarity, an ingrained cultural parochialism, of which Americans should work harder to cure themselves. Of the Soviet habit since 1917 of invading and assimilating neighbors, not a word is said.

In addition to the delusion that the Soviets are our enemies, there is the danger of the world struggle for resources. “What happens when an increasing number of people want scarce resources?” The UCS answer to this problem comes in the form of a game, in which an odd number of candies is given out to groups with an even number of students. The subsequent discussion by the class as to how it overcame this obstacle to perfect sharing constitutes the lesson.

Other exercises of sharing and “cooperation” are suggested, among them “The Dollar Game.” Here the class is divided in two, and each side bids how many cents it will pay for a dollar bill offered by the teacher, but with the catch that both sides must pay the teacher the sums they bid, win or lose. The aim is to get the students to set aside competition, and “cooperate”: “After one side goes over 50 cents, it may become apparent that you will gain at the next bid, since the sum of the two bids will be more than $1. One side may even begin to negotiate with the other at an earlier point.” Of course, the idea that eliminating competition among bidders is a virtue would only occur to academics displeased with the workings of a free economy. If companies bidding for a highway contract were to follow the ethics recommended by the UCS and the NEA, they would be subject to criminal indictment by the state prosecutor for colluding to fix prices.

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With the only grounds for tension between the United States and the Soviet Union being an “us vs. them” mentality (from which we alone appear to be suffering) and an ill-controlled craving for scarce resources, the expenditure of U.S. public funds on arms becomes irrational, not to say immoral. To dramatize this lesson Choices has a game called “The United States National Budget.” Again the class divides into groups, with each group receiving twenty tokens and a sheet listing the various categories into which the tokens may go. The students (with no background information whatsoever) are invited to allocate the tokens as they think right, and are explicitly told: “Your twenty tokens represent all of the money in the national budget.” The various groups are afterward asked to compare their answers. Choices then instructs the teacher: “Pass out the proposed 1987 National Budget (Worksheet 603). Tell students this represents the average figures of the proposed 1987 United States budget.”

Here is how the twenty tokens are distributed in the “National Budget”:

The purpose of the exercise is to “shock” children about “the truth” of U.S. defense spending, and to demonstrate how miserly and inhumane we are by comparison in allocating funds for “social needs.” But either the Union of Concerned Scientists is ignorant of known facts, or it has difficulty performing a task of simple arithmetic: to allot nine out of twenty tokens—or 45 percent—to National Defense, when the actual defense budget in recent years has run consistently between 26 and 29 percent, is a piece of major misinformation for teachers to be telling students.

Beyond the plain falsehood concerning the proportion of our defense budget, there are, as so often in Choices, crucial omissions here, whose purpose can only be to create a false picture of reality. To use the term “national budget” instead of federal budget, and then to list “education,” “food and nutrition,” “retirement,” “physical needs,” “transportation,” “housing,” “community development,” “health,” “medical research,” “energy,” “science,” “agriculture,” and so on, is seriously to mislead the young, who may not know that such things are funded overwhelmingly by state or local governments, or are sustained by private enterprise. It might, in addition, interest our children, if not educators inhospitable to defense budgets, that in constant dollars public spending for defense has risen only 1.2 percent in the last twenty years, whereas the increase in America's spending on “social needs” has risen a breathtaking 214 percent. As a consequence, the share of total public spending consumed by defense since 1965 has declined, from 37 to about 15 percent. But facts like these have the inconvenience of not conforming to the image of America that the UCS entertains.

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II

The programmed feelings that Choices is designed to arouse in students—fear, horror, shame, and finally righteous indignation—must, in keeping with the therapy promised from the first page by Dr. Mack, resolve themselves in action. But there is a problem here. Despite what they have been told by the youth culture and by “progressives,” children, even as old as thirteen, still tend to believe that adults by and large know more than they. And since adults for the most part have not yet joined the crusade to get rid of the weapons constructed for our defense, children may hesitate to throw themselves into the “peace” movement with quite the alacrity that the UCS and the NEA would like. To overcome this diffidence, Choices (along with other “peace” curricula) has come up with an ingenious device—a fable to inspire the young—called “The Hundredth Monkey.” So useful is this tale to its purposes that Choices makes sure to set it forth as early as Lesson 1, referring back to it reverently in subsequent lessons as though to the founding myth of a religion.

“The Hundredth Monkey” is, among other things, a fascinating instance of the deliberate misuse of scientific knowledge for political ends. The original facts on which it is based are these: in 1952 some Japanese scientists observing the behavior of macaque monkeys on the island of Koshima decided, as an experiment, to leave yams (a food unfamiliar to the monkeys) scattered upon the beach. One of the monkeys, a young female, soon found that the edibility of the yams was much improved by washing them in the nearby water, to remove the sand. Soon other monkeys. beginning with the younger ones, imitated the first, until the washing of yams had become, as it were, an acquired cultural habit.

Those are the facts. In the version given in Choices, however, there are significant modifications. The young female, “named Imo,” discovers that seawater removes sand from yams. “She taught this trick to her mother. Her playmates also learned this new way and they taught their mothers, too.” This mild distortion continues: “Only the adults who imitated their children learned this social improvement. Other adults kept eating the dirty sweet potatoes.”

At this point the story acquires wings and takes flight into myth:

In the autumn of 1958 something startling took place. Though the exact number is not known, let us suppose that when the sun rose one morning there were 99 monkeys on Koshima Island who had learned to wash their potatoes. Let's further suppose that later that morning, the hundredth monkey learned to wash potatoes. Then it happened!

By that evening almost everyone in the tribe was washing sweet potatoes before eating them. The added energy of the hundredth monkey created a breakthrough! Thus, when a critical number achieves an awareness, this new awareness may be communicated from mind to mind.

Although the exact number may vary, the Hundreth Monkey Phenomenon means that when only a limited number of people know of a new way, it may remain in the minds of only these people. But there is a point at which if only one more person tunes in to the new awareness, the idea is strengthened so that it reaches almost everyone!

Your awareness is needed in preventing nuclear war.

You may be the “Hundredth Monkey.”

The idea that a “new awareness” will be accepted by all remaining skeptics “if only one more person tunes in” is a piece of social fantasy. And to apply this fantasy to the monkeys of Koshima, as a scientifically observed event, is complete and utter nonsense. Yet Choices with a straight face tells both teacher and students: “The experiment illustrates the concept of ‘critical number’ whereby the attainment of a certain level of concentration causes some quality, property, or phenomenon to undergo a definite change.” And lest the moral be lost on any inattentive student, the teacher is instructed to ask the class: “How are people who learn about nuclear war like the monkeys who learned to wash the sweet potatoes?” And: “Can adults learn about nuclear war from young people?”

Although indifference to American values and to vital facts of world history is apparent in Choices from the first lesson to the last, the particular use of the Hundredth Monkey myth adds another dimension to the misuse of public education. Unlike what happened at Koshima, where a young member of the monkey colony did indeed make an autonomous discovery, these junior-high-school students are doing no such thing. They are being coached by adults. And yet they are being made to believe that this is not so, that Choices is merely opening a door upon their own privileged perceptions, which possess a superior moral status to those of their parents and other adults.

Now it happens that something very similar occurred in American history once before. In 17th-century Salem a group of children, their status as “innocents” enabling them to command authority over adult society with quite astonishing effect, began denouncing adult members of the community as agents of the devil. We now know more fully what happened: the children were not hearing “divine commands,” but had absorbed adult emotions from two unhealthy sources, an atmosphere of bitterness existing between their own village clan and a rival group of families, and the superstitious tales of horror told the children by a kitchen maid. Turned hysterical, the children began identifying members of the rival clan as “witches,” and were believed on faith in their natural innocence. This circular pattern of influence, from adults to children and then from children back to adults, but now amplified by the presumption of some moral or divine privilege in children, might appropriately be called the Salem Syndrome. The contemporary usefulness of the concept is that it conforms, in all essentials, to what we observe operating between “peace educators” and children in the public schools.

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The emotions induced by Choices—fear (of imminent nuclear holocaust, owing to our means of defense), shame (at having invented atomic bombs and made use of them to end World War II), horror (from tireless study of Hiroshima), and above all anger (at adult America for persisting in maintaining its nuclear deterrent, owing to false suspicions of the Soviet Union)—run the risk of simply depressing students and discouraging them from taking any action at all. To counter this danger, Lesson 9 encourages them to imagine, as the title puts it, “A Better World.”

On this theme students are asked to compose poems, skits, and songs, to construct collages and paint posters, with the year “2080 A.D.” offered as a possible target date for the emergence of a more loving, less hostile America. Lesson 9 also urges teachers to “Have students listen to some music that encourages creativity,” listing such options as “There's a Place for Us” from West Side Story, “Ain't Gonna Study War No More” by Pete Seeger, and “Imagine” by John Lennon. The first of these is a soulful duet for lovers separated by the ethnic prejudices of a pair of warring gangs; the second preaches the pacifist credo that to stop wars we should get rid of our military; and the last attributes war and the world's other ills to the persistence of religion and the continued existence of national boundaries.

The tenth and concluding lesson of Choices opens gravely:

The final day of the unit will give students time to reflect on the unit and consider ideas for action. At the beginning, you should remind students of the story of “The Hundredth Monkey” and the power of the individual to make a difference, especially when joined with others in a group action. Imagining what a better world could look like (Lesson 9) can also be productive in encouraging students to act on their beliefs.

A list of suggested activities follows, aimed first at the school community itself (“Do a videotape on the unit and play for the school”; “teach younger children within the school topics learned in the unit”; “form student groups on issues of nuclear war and its prevention”) and then at the larger adult community, the school now transformed into a center for “peace” activism, provided free of charge by the taxpayers. “Contact the PTA and make the class's concerns known.” “Contact the local radio and TV news and ask to present a one-minute summary of class opinions on nuclear weapons or nuclear war.” “Set up a literature table at a community event such as a flea market or block party.”

That done, the students can begin lobbying regional politicians: “Call or write your state legislators. Find out their positions on arms limitation and peace through strength. Write back expressing your views.” Nor should the children's crusade shirk from advancing to the federal level: “Write the White House and tell the President of your concerns.” “Write your Representatives and Senators, and ask their views on nuclear war, national defense, and potential arms agreements such as SALT, START, freeze, and No First Use. After you receive their letters, write back explaining how you agree or disagree with their views.”

But the most provocative if elliptical suggestion, stopping just short of inciting to civil disruption, is the following: “Find out the role the military plays in the community. Are weapons produced at a local plant (see the map which follows)? Is research and development in progress at a local university? Are weapons stored at a nearby base?” The map on the facing page is the final image the children are shown, and it nicely ties in with the mushroom cloud that opens the manual, It is titled, “Nuclear Weapons Locations in the United States,” and is the handiwork of the innocent-sounding Center for Defense Information (CDI), which might more aptly be named the Anti-Defense Center. The map pinpoints every U.S. Air Force base, Navy base, Army base, ICBM missile field, and every research or industrial site suspected of making or housing nuclear weapons. No equivalent map of the USSR is offered. At the foot of the page appears the title of the article in which the map originally appeared: “Preparing for Nuclear War: President Reagan's Program.”

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III

When the nuclear-freeze movement was at its apogee, a group calling itself Educators for Social Responsibility (ESR) formed in the Boston-Cambridge area to carry the cause into the public schools. It has been highly successful in its task, assisted by an allied group of youthful recruits (with NEA support as well) called “Student/Teacher Organization to Prevent Nuclear War” (STOP). Launching its campaign in hundreds of schools across the country with a “Day of Dialogue” in the fall of 1982, ESR subsequently turned out three huge curriculum guides: Dialogue: A Teaching Guide to Nuclear Issues; Decision Making in a Nuclear Age; and Perspectives: A Teaching Guide to Concepts of Peace. Several of the authors of Choices also helped write the teaching guides for ESR, but with a revealing difference. Where Choices is content to suggest, the guides produced by ESR assert; where the former allows but a glimpse of occasional intimacy with the Left, in the latter this cautionary veil has become completely transparent.

A specialty of Educators for Social Responsibility is its readiness to begin working on young minds from the earliest school age. While Choices is prepared to wait until the young have reached junior high, ESR starts in kindergarten. Accordingly, it is not surprising to find in both Dialogue and Perspectives a heavy emphasis on children's stories, ideal instruments in the task of teaching the very young the attitudes necessary for changing the world.

To demonstrate to children that Western fears of the Soviet Union are merely based on mistaken perceptions, Perspectives recommends “The Stranger: A Modern Fable,” which “tells the story about how people, in their fear of a giant stranger, bring out their cannon against him. When they finally get to talk to him, they like him a lot and he is invited to stay in their country.” In another story, “The Tears of the Dragon,” the misperception idea is neatly fused with another, that of the-child-as-saintly-leader-of-adults: “A little boy refusing to believe a village rumor that a dragon is evil, decides to invite the dragon to his birthday party, thereby overcoming prejudice and misinformation.” Then there is “Jonathan and the Dragon,” wherein a child once again shows adults the folly of their ways: “After the mayor and townspeople have tried violent means to no avail, a little boy gets the invading dragon out of town simply by whispering a polite request to him.” (ESR might consider shipping a few cartons of this invaluable story to assist the mujahedeen in Afghanistan.)

Other stories follow, each making its simple and unmistakable point. “The Tomato Patch” demonstrates that it is not real conflict but rather the making of weapons which is the cause of war. “The Pig War” presents two groups claiming the same piece of territory, and has as its moral that “deciding to share avoids conflicts.” “Potatoes, Potatoes” is a “right-to-the-point story about two countries at war, a mother's attempt to shield her two sons from it,” and teaches its lesson in the form of a question: “If people spend all their time fighting, building, and polishing weapons, who will have time to grow food to sustain the people?” A continuous theme of these stories suggests to small children the frightening notion that their food will disappear if we persist in maintaining our defenses.)

Two final stories make the case that enlisting in the military services of one's country adds violence and stupidity to one's character. In “Two Admirals,” “Two competitive and egotistical admirals turn the village to a shambles as they try to outdo each other; the innkeeper offers a prize to the one who can keep the peace longer.” In “The Generals,” a pair of generals “would rather go to the beach and play than fight a war,” but their cultural rigidity makes them invent excuses to avoid the effort of changing their routine, so that the story “ends with their destruction.”

Nowhere in these teaching guides are children reminded that in America we enjoy a system of government that places the military under the control of elected civilians, voted into office by the people, and that there is not a single case of our military having so much as attempted to break off from this authority to start a war.

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If stories are one way to guide children to foreordained conclusions, classroom discussion completes the task. Here is the sort of questioning judged appropriate for a teacher addressing children in the 2nd and 3rd grades (ages 7-8) on the existence of atomic bombs: “Do you really think there is such a thing? Do you think a war could end the world? Does that scare you?” ESR cites one response to such questions in order to justify its own adult activism: “Sam's reaction supports one of our strongly held views: That adults' peacemaking efforts are a source of reassurance for children” (emphasis in original). This is one of the favorite devices in the movement's tireless manipulation of children: not only does inducing fear open the way to fresh conversions in the young, but worry about the psychological damage inflicted on children is then used to enlist the support of parents.

While ESR has no qualms about encouraging fears of nuclear holocaust, it is prompt to quell fears related to Soviet aggression. Such fears are “based on misinterpretation and misinformation,” and should be gently corrected by the teacher of small children along the following lines: “Judy, you said something interesting about the Russians. But actually the leaders of the Soviet Union have said they want to work on peace, and we know that a lot of people there feel the way we do and are working hard to prevent war.”

For slightly older children, in grades 4 to 6,Dialogue recommends a more detailed inquiry into nuclear war, with the teacher ready to answer such questions as, “What happens to people when a nuclear bomb explodes near them?” Should a child respond with the anxious complaint that “it's just not fair that other people have made the world like this,” the teacher can vigorously nod: “We agree. Lots of grownups all over the world are trying to find ways to make the world better and get rid of things like bombs. Maybe you could help by writing letters.”

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In Confornting mainstream America, even in the form of its youngest representatives, ESR is aware that there are still substantial obstacles to overcome. For example, the editors of Perspectives report that one group of 6th graders whom they questioned in the course of preparing their volume “had a strong image of the Soviets as enemies.” This “was based on little information,” in the editors' view, as was the students' equally mistaken idea of life in totalitarian societies: “They were perceived as colorless, almost inhumanly oppressive places. . . . There was no joy. There was nothing to buy. People worked long hours in almost slave conditions. And they were governed by brutal, aggressive dictatorships.” “Where,” ESR asks plaintively, “did such young students acquire these images?” More importantly, “As they grow older, how will these images taint the way they look at international relations, at the prospects of peace?”

Even teachers may be “misinformed” about the nature of the Soviet Union. Lesson 7 of Dialogue, “Letting the Soviets Enter the Dialogue,” sets out to overcome this state of backwardness. Teachers and students together are asked to read official Soviet publications about Soviet aims, policies, the conditions of life in the Soviet Union, and its relations with neighboring countries. Incredibly, they are asked to take all assertions found in these publications at face value.

To be sure, this may prove difficult at first, since “in many instances the teachers will find themselves initially uninformed and suffering from prejudices similar to their students.” Consequently in reading Soviet documents “teachers will have to work through material which may challenge their own assumptions.”

The teachers are further cautioned “that reluctance to learn about the Soviets will manifest itself in many disguised forms. As an example, a student may insist that anything written by the Soviet government can't be trusted because it is propaganda and doesn't represent the opinion of the people.” To this seemingly sensible objection, ESR replies vaguely: “In general, challenging our stereotypes is more uncomfortable than maintaining our familiar distrust.” And with patience the student's resistance can be overcome: “Teachers can help students to understand the underlying motivations for their resistance by asking the right questions in a supportive way.”

Without so much as a sentence to acknowledge that in the Soviet Union honest expression is illegal, existing only in the form of underground samizdat passed from hand to hand, ESR cheerily recommends “examination of Soviet newspapers and periodicals” as “an excellent way to learn about Soviet life and Soviet thinking on contemporary issues.” As to Soviet publications aimed at sympathetic Westerners, such as New Times, its “experts” can even help Americans better understand (in the words of ESR) “the problems of human rights, Soviet aid to Cuba, the problems of youth in the West and the USSR, the proper handling of juvenile delinquency, efficiency of workers in socialist and capitalist societies, women's rights, and national minorities.” Also recommended from the USSR Academy of Sciences is Peace and Disarmament, which “contains numerous articles on the struggle for peace.”

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This awesome willingness to gaze upon the Soviet Union with a benevolent eye is not extended, reciprocally so to speak, to the United States. One would think, for example, that an organization supposedly bent on stopping wars would pay some attention to a real war, actually taking place, rather than to merely hypothetical wars in the future, in apprehension of which we are asked to begin disarming ourselves at once. When the ESR teaching guides first appeared, the war in Afghanistan had been raging for years, yet nowhere in the 269 pages of Dialogue or the 402 pages of Perspectives can one find a single paragraph dealing with it. By contrast, references to the Vietnam war are frequent, and are used throughout these curriculum guides to illustrate American deception, brutality, and violence. To show what opposition to Communism can lead to, extensive attention is paid to the killing of civilians by Lt. William Calley at Mylai.

While ESR is prepared to take the most transparently invented public statements of Soviet intentions at face value, the one time a definition is offered of American intentions in the postwar period, it occurs in a section of the guide devoted to “Propaganda in Textbooks.” Here is what ESR unblushingly calls an example of “propaganda,” cited from an American textbook: “The Americans of 1945 did not suppose, as so many had in 1918, that victory relieved them of further international responsibility. Many saw America's role as a historic opportunity. Some hoped to use American power to build a lasting structure of world peace and to advance the cause of liberal democracy.”

In searching for the causes of war and the sources of the East-West conflict, ESR, like a poet discovering the universe in a grain of sand, is able to locate them all within the borders of the United States alone. Decision Making, which specializes in the evils of the 1950's, describes the Alger Hiss and Rosenberg trials as “a hoax on history” and carries the distinct implication that these events were responsible for the cold war, with an unbalanced America initiating the nuclear arms race which followed. Perspectives and Dialogue carry the indictment to the present.

ESR does not hesitate to name Ronald Reagan as an obstacle to world peace, and a figure to be regarded by children with anxiety. Selected remarks by the President are placed alongside pacific statements by Martin Luther King, Jr. and Albert Einstein, not just for the obvious invidious effect but also as an opening wedge into the whole question of civil disobedience. Since King is a genuine American hero, ESR ingeniously evokes his image to lend sanction to its own views on civil disobedience in general, and acts of civil disobedience against America's provisions for national defense in particular.

Among the milder incitements to such action is an article reprinted in Perspectives from the Boston Globe about the conscience struggle of a U.S. serviceman stationed in West Germany. In violation of the Army Code, the soldier began attending West German “peace” rallies, whereupon he was arraigned by the Army for participating in political demonstrations while in uniform. In the article, the young soldier is hailed as a sort of martyr by his cousin, a pastor who had advised him, for having demonstrated “a broader view of life and commitment.”

In the same vein, a section in Perspectives entitled “Colonial Peace Churches” pays tribute to earlier pacifists, in order that students may better appreciate why today “people may be asked not to pay that portion of their taxes which goes to the building of weapons, or to resist being drafted into the military.” The editors of Dialogue grant that “facts and rational arguments” have their place in bringing about political change, but events like “the report of a priest dumping blood on a Trident submarine are at least as valuable.”

The articles ESR cites and quotes, the books, films, videotapes it recommends add up to an endless catalogue of what is wrong with America as seen through the eyes of the Left. Even when it makes the gesture of granting a word to those who view the world differently, the result is a mockery of any semblance of real debate. President Reagan's speech to the National Association of Evangelicals, for example, with its religious references and explicit designation of the Soviet Union as an “evil empire,” might have served as the occasion for a bonafide inquiry into Reagan's views of the Soviet Union and the reasons behind them. Instead, ESR feeds the students rigged questions, designed to suggest that the President's religious terms of speech and thought have obscured his understanding of the world: “Why does the President refer to ‘sin and evil,’ not ‘bad and injustice’?” A tone of irony creeps in: “What does he mean by ‘freedom’ and how have we kept the ‘torch’ going?” “What does he say are the Soviet attitudes toward God and morality? Why do you think this upsets the President?” Without any documents offered to provide an answer, ESR asks the students, “Do the Soviets want to take over America?” The possibility that Leninist ideology might include the notion of world conquest is regarded by all the “peace” curricula as nothing but an old-wives' tale.

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That President Reagan's speech did not sit well with the Educators for Social Responsibility is not surprising. For decades social scientists with advanced views have been trying to purge us of the antiquated idea that there might actually be such a thing in this world as forces wishing us ill. Since ordinary people persist in thinking otherwise, ESR invites students to enlarge their minds on the subject by considering the insights of Eastern mysticism: “Our society is a conflict-oriented society. We tend to see the world in terms of competing interests. . . . [But] in Eastern philosophy . . . conflict and paradox (represented by yin and yang) are part of a harmonic unity.” Ignoring the prohibition against thumping for or against a religious faith in the schools, ESR suggests that “the roots of our attraction to conflict” reside in “Western tradition and religious values,” and urges teachers to “explore with the students the good guy/bad guy dichotomy that pervades our Western mythology and our texts, or the God and the devil imagery that is part of the Christian ethic.”

To help students free themselves from such burdensome notions, Perspectives offers a selection from This Is It, by Alan Watts, the American guru, whose sermon aims at proving that good and evil are actually indissoluble. “To Confucius it seemed much better to be human-hearted than righteous, and to the great Taoists, Lao-tzu and Chiang-tzu, it was obvious that one could not be right without also being wrong, because the two were as inseparable as back to front.” Watts concedes that to the Western mind such words “may sound cynical” (not to say air-headed), but that is due to our narrow cultural and religious training:

Actually they reflect a marvelous understanding and respect for what we call the balance of nature, human and otherwise—a universal vision of life as the Tao or way of nature. . . . Therefore wisdom did not consist in trying to wrest the good from the evil but in learning to “ride” them as a cork adapts itself to the crests and troughs of the waves. At the roots of Chinese life there is a trust in the good-and-evil of one's own nature which is particularly foreign to those brought up with the chronic uneasy conscience of the Hebrew-Christian cultures.

The Educators for Social Responsibility do not bother asking the high-school students in their care just where we would be today if we had treated Nazism in 1942 as meriting “understanding and respect,” or what the outcome might have been if instead of opposing the Axis forces with Western might, we had sought “to ‘ride’ them as a cork adapts itself to the crests and troughs of the waves.”

The feminist contingent of ESR then takes the podium, as Perspectives offers selections from a work by Joanna Macy (Despair and Personal Power in the Nuclear Age), wherein it is claimed that science has proved we no longer need to defend ourselves. Primitive science saw reality as composed of entities, instead of processes. “If I am one of these entities, then, I certainly want to protect myself . . . whether as a personality or a nation-state.” But now all that is over, because science (in the view of Miss Macy) has discovered “processes” and abolished “entities,” as a result of which all our old—i.e., patriarchal—ideas concerning power have been dissolved; true power today consists in being vulnerable:

So now we see power in a new light. It is not invulnerability, but openness. In a way we have known this all along . . . because that is the direction of evolution: life forms as they evolve become ever more vulnerable to their environment, the better to connect and respond.

This quite fantastical version of biology (our antibodies, busy devouring harmful toxins and bacteria, fortunately have not yet heard of Miss Macy's new conception of “power”) is followed by the lesson at which this whole exercise in mysticism aims and the reason for its inclusion in the “peace” guide. “Having been conditioned by the old patriarchal paradigm of power, we are not accustomed to viewing this capacity [for vulnerability] as power. It is important we do so now, because our survival depends on moving beyond the primitive, competitive, win/lose notions of power.” In other words, the West must disarm.

On younger children, obviously, Alan Watts's and Joanna Macy's maunderings are not likely to have much impact. For them the ethos of surrender is better taught through less abstract methods, such as the growing body of new “cooperative” games designed by the adversary culture to supplant the old “competitive” games—with their deplorable concepts of “winning” and “losing”—that children have played down through the ages. One such game described in Perspectives is a variant form of arm-wrestling in which the teacher gives a chocolate to the “winner” each time he prevails; but the hope is that the children will eventually “catch on” that if each child alternately ceases to resist, and limply lets the other win, they will jointly accumulate a far greater mass of chocolates. The same Skinnerian approach is evident in a second game, the “peace” version of the old tug-of-war, now made over—with each side's letting the other prevail—into a “Tug of Peace.”

Perhaps the oddest exercise along these lines has an eerily totalitarian flavor. It is a game called “Peacewatch,” which Perspectives describes as follows: “Each student picks from a hat the name of a fellow classmate to ‘watch’ for the day so that everyone is both watching and being watched but with no one knowing who is watching whom.” The class is asked to design a medal, made of paper, to be awarded to the child most skilled at this mutual spying operation. The child is then acclaimed “Peacemaker of the Week.”

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Having ceaselessly manipulated the children in its care, Educators for Social Responsibility, like the Union of Concerned Scientists, then holds up to adults the brainwashed children as proof that our society is deranged, and that drastic action is needed (the Salem Syndrome). In the case of ESR, the tone of contrived solicitude for children's fears about nuclear war becomes especially oily: “We must listen closely to their concerns, hear their outrage, and show that some adults are deeply committed to helping them clarify their own views, find their own approaches to action, and express their feelings in their own ways.”

So committed is ESR to having children “find their own approaches to action”—and so anxious to ensure that “their own approaches” are the correct ones—that it provides teachers with a detailed list of projects for the children to undertake under their guidance. What follows is a partial selection from this list.

For elementary-school children: “Write to the President and other government representatives” about your “views concerning the arms race”; to improve children's views of the Soviets, “Try having them rewrite fairy tales from the point of view of the villain”; “create posters and ask neighborhood shop owners to display them”; have children “meet with religious representatives in their community to encourage them to arrange a special program about nuclear war for a church or synagogue service”; “put on a play or neighborhood fair which has as its theme the prevention of nuclear war”; “put together a TV and/or radio message about the nuclear arms race”; “prepare a picture window display . . . and find a bank or other public institution in which to put it”; “design ‘a Peace Mural’ and ask the local library or local city/town hall to display it”; “learn peace songs” and “present them as a concert”; “create . . . comic strips with superhero(ine)s fighting for the eradication of all nuclear arms”; “design placemats which can be laminated and placed in local eating places”; “organize a ‘Children's March for Peace’ through your neighborhood”; “make and display banners”; “if you have access to a button machine, have children design ‘Buttons for Peace’”; “draw a portrait of a peacemaker” (e.g., Joan Baez, Helen Caldicott, Gandhi) “and mount it with a short biography in the student's own words”; “pick a tune” and “write the words to a song about the peacemaker. Sing it in class. Teach it to others in the school.”

Older students are encouraged to emulate “peacemakers” (the American Friends Service Committee is cited), and to invite them to the school to be interviewed; their biographies should be written by students and “placed in the local library” or made into “a show for the local cable network.” Social activism takes on the proportions of a moral duty as teachers are instructed to ask: “What would you need to develop in yourself to become such a social activist? Imagine you have become the social activist your class ‘created.’ What would you do? How would you change things?” Students should “join a group,” “attend rallies that are being held in your area,” “raise money [for] rallies or marches in other areas,” and call on the town “to hold a public hearing” to challenge plans for civil defense.

Finally, beyond their class duties of indoctrination, the teachers are instructed on “How to Involve Parents,” with the caution, “Start with a group of parents who are on your side rather than stirring up resistance which you will have to deal with later.” The teachers themselves are directly solicited to join ESR and contribute money to the cause. Thus the curriculum guide as activist manual and fund-raising device; we have come a long way in this country in our educational practices.

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IV

One might be tempted to dismiss Educators for Social Responsibility as a marginal left-wing element in the larger scheme of American education. This would be a serious mistake. The National Advisory Board of ESR includes such persons of power and prestige as George Rathjens of MIT; Ernest Boyer, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching; David Fraser, president of Swarthmore College; H. Michael Hartoonian, supervisor of social studies education for the state of Wisconsin; Mary Futrell, president of the NEA; Terry Herndon, former executive director of the NEA; Matthew Prophet, superintendent of schools of Portland, Oregon; Charles Slater, superintendent of schools of Brookline, Massachusetts; Floretta McKenzie, superintendent of schools for the District of Columbia; Harold Raynolds, superintendent of education for the state of Alaska; Reverend J. Bryan Hehir, associate director of International Justice and Peace, U.S. Catholic Conference; Adele Simmons, president of Hampshire College (which serves a consortium of five colleges with a college version of “Peace Studies”); Reverend Theodore M. Hesburgh, president of Notre Dame; and, not least, the omnipresent Carl Sagan.

It is thanks to influential people and institutions like these that state and city governments have been talked into making “peace education” mandatory in their public schools. But now that they have done so, it is appropriate for the rest of us to bethink ourselves what should be done.

The advent of “peace education” raises fundamental questions about the proper function of public education in a democracy. Never in the history of the United States have the public schools been conceived as a licit vehicle for one political segment of the population to convert the children of another. So obvious has this long seemed that there are few (if any) formal laws prohibiting so outrageous an abuse of the public trust as what “peace” educators have ventured.

The assumption that underlies publicly-funded education in a pluralist society where school attendance is compulsory is that the schools exist to teach basic skills, basic knowledge, and uncontested values needed for democratic citizenship. On matters where the people divide, notably in religion and politics, the schools are to maintain a position of strict neutrality. To do otherwise invites the transformation of the schoolhouse into a battleground for community civil wars. This well-established principle in no way prohibits the creation of private schools, in which persons who want their children taught in the particular mores of Christian fundamentalism, Jewish orthodoxy, or Quaker pacifism are at full liberty to do so. What is not permissible is the suborning of public institutions that are the property of all into tools for the specialized beliefs of a zealous few out to convert the children of others.

The large degree of local control which American communities still enjoy over their schools permits relief from the current disorder by those who would wish to correct it. We—taxpayers and parents—have long assumed that public schools should remain politically neutral. We have assumed that teachers' politics are their private business, not the public's, and so have demanded no political tests for the job; but the other half of the implicit contract has been that teachers, in turn, are not to use their authority over children for indoctrinating them in their own political enthusiasms. Teachers who push “peace education” in the classroom are manifestly violating the terms of this trust. The public is entitled to say that they should either cease the indoctrination, or find another form of employment.