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The Perils of Nuclear Education
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12040 |
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BOOK WORLD
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12 / 1987 |
2,161 Words |
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W. Wesley McDonald
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ARMAGEDDON IN THE CLASSROOM
An Examination of Nuclear Education
Herbert I. London
Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, Inc.
127 pp.
To introduce a unit on nuclear weapons to a group of tenth graders, they are shown Hiroshima/Nagasaki, a film depicting in grisly detail the horrifying death and maiming of Japanese women and children following the dropping of American atomic bombs. Stunned by the spectacle, one emotionally distraught student asks, "Why did we do it?" "We did it once; we can do it again," the teacher answers. "Whether these weapons of destruction are used depends on you."
After discussing their personal expectations for the future, a seventh-grade social studies class was shocked when their teacher dismissed all their optimistic hopes by grimly observing that "in this world with nuclear weapons no one in this class will be alive in the year 2000."
At a high school in Suffolk County, Long Island, President Truman was put on trial posthumously by students for his decision to drop the atom bomb on Japan. "he was found guilty of crimes against humanity by a vote of 23 to 0."
These are only a few of the many representative examples of so-called nuclear education offered by Herbert London in his lucidly written new book, Armageddon in the Classroom. London, the dean of the Gallatin Division at New York university and a senior fellow of the Center for Education Employment Policy at the Hudson Institute, has analyzed the content of the educational materials used in these courses and strives to assess the extent to which nuclear education programs have become a part of the curriculum in American schools.
For this study, he contacted more than 300 school districts to inquire about their nuclear education programs. Based on the data gathered from 152 respondents, he estimates that "between twelve and fifteen percent of schools have a formal curriculum at either the elementary or secondary level on nuclear education." In nearly a third of the cases, nuclear weapons are discussed on the elementary level. The most frequently used materials in the formal programs of nuclear education, he discovered, were Choices: A Unit on Conflict and Nuclear War, prepared by the National Education Association, and Crossroads: Quality of Life in a nuclear World, prepared by Jobs With Peace, "a self-declared anti-defense group."
These approaches to the study of nuclear weapons now taking place in schoolrooms across America are an outgrowth of the peace studies movement that has been growing in popularity in high schools and colleges since the early 1980s. Most of the teaching material in the field is decidedly biased and intended to instill in students a partisan political point of view and does not educate them on the difficult problems of war and peace.
The role of peace organizations
"The campaign to install nuclear education courses into schools has been promoted by a vast network of lobbying groups and activist peace
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