020-mapping-hatred-in-schools.html (2666B)
1 <h1>Mapping hatred taught in schools</h1> 2 3 <p> 4 I'm writing this down so I don't lose it. 5 </p> 6 7 <p> 8 I recently learned that in some <em>redacted</em> schools, children are taught that <em>redacted</em> hate them - which becomes a justification for violence, whether framed as attack or self-defense. That's what triggered this, but the idea isn't really about one country. It's about a pattern I suspect shows up everywhere conflict is normalized for children: schoolbooks that teach an entire group of people as an enemy to be feared or destroyed, rather than just describing a conflict. 9 </p> 10 11 <p> 12 Why this matters to me, beyond individual passages: this isn't one lesson, it's repetition - the same message delivered day after day, year after year, from as early as school starts, for an entire childhood. Applied consistently over that many years, on children who have no way to evaluate or resist it, that's functionally indoctrination, whatever else is happening in the surrounding culture or media. And it doesn't stay in the classroom: adults raised on "they hate us and want to kill us" are less likely to question mandatory military service, or to refuse an order to harm someone they've spent their whole childhood learning isn't fully human. Doing this deliberately to children specifically is, to me, a violation of children's rights in its own right - the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child says education should prepare children "in the spirit of understanding, peace, tolerance, equality of sexes, and friendship among all peoples, ethnic, national and religious groups" (Article 29). Systematically teaching the opposite is hard to square with that. 13 </p> 14 15 <p> 16 The idea, as a first step: build a corpus of school textbooks - grade zero through twelve - from as many countries as possible, and go through them looking for passages that teach hatred toward an outgroup: "they hate us," "we must defend ourselves by force," "they are the enemy." Collect and point to these references directly, rather than relying on summary or hearsay. 17 </p> 18 19 <p> 20 Once there's real material to work with, I'd want to organize it two ways: rank countries by war/military budget on one end, and by poverty and lack of education on the other, to see whether there's any visible relationship between how a country teaches conflict to its children and where it sits on either axis. 21 </p> 22 23 <p> 24 I don't have the corpus yet, and I don't know if the correlation I'm guessing at is even real. If it interests you and you want to help build it, or even just talk about it, get in touch. And if someone takes this and actually runs with it - that alone would make me happy. 25 </p>