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In June 1926, the Norwegian, Danish and Swedish groups of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom held a radio evening. From the capitals of the three countries, speeches on peace and education for peace were broadcast to all listeners in the Nordic region. In addition to Nina Bang, Professor Fridtjof Nansen from Oslo and Mayor Carl Lindhagen from Stockholm spoke. Nina Bang’s speech is reproduced here after the booklet “Peace” published by the Norwegian group of the league containing the three speeches.
By Nina Bang
My invisible listeners in Norway, Sweden and Denmark!
In the passionate battles which the militaristic conception of life is waging in modern societies, soon in the praise of war as the only recognizable expression of manhood, soon in the waging of real war, there is not even peace for the children. War is brought into the children’s imagination. Through the readings and verses in schoolbooks, through history books, it drips into the children’s souls as a matter of course – even the war as it really is, but it is a rewritten war, adorned where it is the war of their own people, defiled where it is that of the enemy.
In schools, children learn about the constant wars – war succeeds war – but they do not learn about the wars that no longer take place, they do not learn about the pacified areas. There was a time when Zealand fought with Jutland, Denmark with Sweden, a time when Northern France brought fire and sword down upon Southern France, when Englishmen and Scotsmen, when Northern Germans and Southern Germans fought bloody battles among themselves. These wars have long since ceased, and the areas are pacified; there are still areas in Europe where pacification is quite recent, others where it has scarcely begun, and Europe itself is in the midst of a tremendous process. – During one of the real peace negotiations held after the World War, where the representatives of the peoples spoke to each other on equal terms, Briand said: “In the light of these treaties we are neither French nor Germans: we are Europeans.
It is to this progressive movement that the school opens the eyes of the children only in a small degree. Our children learn nothing of the efforts for peace that have succeeded, nothing of the longing for peace that runs through the people, even where blood still flows. But the children have a right to know the truth; falsified history teaching and false poetry should be taken out of school.
The champions of progress and peace have finally opened their eyes to the poisonous sources for children’s minds, the schoolbooks that give false images of life and history.
Not long ago, a work on schoolbooks was published. The Carnegie Foundation for International Peace has commissioned a study of how the World War, its origin, its course
Its origins, its course and its results have been presented in the belligerent countries in books of all kinds used in primary and secondary schools.
The survey fills 450 pages and provides a material which reveals, on both the belligerent sides, a propaganda towards the children often of the most hideous kind, often revolting by the images it presents to the children, by the swollen national feeling it preaches, and perhaps even more by the complete lack of proof of the truth of what is told. Let us take a few examples:
In a Catholic abbot’s book for young people, there is a passage in which a little French girl, “the girl with the severed hands,” prays a terrible prayer: I do not ask you, God, to give me back my father, for I know that when the Prussians have taken your father away, he will never come home. But I ask you, God, to cut off the hands of the German Emperor’s grandson and send them to him, so that he may understand how much it hurts a child and a grandfather when the child’s hands are cut off.
This can be found in a book that is hardly widespread, at least not in public schools, but in “De Smaa’s Læsebog”, printed in 410,000 copies, we read the story of a German soldier who killed a French child who was aiming at him with an innocent wooden gun – and the child reads: a Frenchman would not do that, would he mother, are they not better? And the mother replies: yes, they are better. And if we read the quotations from the German books, we find here the most frightening praise of militarism and imperialism, the most brutal hatred of the French. In Reading Pieces on the World War, published in 1915 by two senior teachers, it says: “Out there at the front, the enemy has cowardly hidden himself in trenches – we attack him, because that dog thinks he can continue to have quarters there. Kill all those who ask for mercy, kill them like dogs.
But to our consolation, the investigations can also reveal to us the completely opposite way of thinking on both sides. It proves the undaunted and successful struggle that the teachers of the French public schools have been waging since 1870 against the implacable doctrine of the schoolbooks, and now a French teacher, who had long been a German prisoner of war, writes in a teachers’ magazine: “I see a great danger in this teaching, which only talks about the atrocities of the enemy nations. Every time these barbaric acts are told about, I know what is going on in the child’s soul. The monsters, they should be killed, it says here. Under the cry: Don’t forget, we see this in the child. I pity the teachers who do this; if sometime in the future thousands of corpses should again cover the soil of Europe, they will have a great responsibility.
And from the German side there are all the beautiful endeavors which have been embodied in the school legislation, the words of the Weimar Constitution that school education shall be given not only in the spirit of German nationalism, but in the spirit of national reconciliation. Democracy pays great attention to excesses in books, and the modern school ideas about the child’s right to develop its nature, which have such ardent advocates in Germany, fortunately prepare no good soil for militaristic propaganda. In a poignantly beautiful way, the war-stricken youth’s own view of the war is presented from the French side in Raynal’s drama: “The Grave under the Arch of Triumph”: The war has lost its prestige, we thought it wild and magnificent in its purple of blood and fire. Now we give it its proper name: it is a work of vandalism – and, says the soldier, is not every brother in war a murderer? And already in a German textbook for 5. Kl. from 1917 we read the same thing: a German soldier, sent out as a scout in an underground shelter, has to kill a young French soldier who is surprised by him; he ends his story like this: I saw nothing but the life I had extinguished, on my knees beside the dead man I begged God for his life and to take mine. My despairing soul rebelled: killing people against whom we feel no hatred!
The investigations I have mentioned here will certainly have great effects; it is too humiliating to let these monstrosities stand. But the studies have messages for far more people than for the former belligerents; even the schoolbooks of neutral countries have stains both on the life of the present and the past, stains of national self-evaluation, of intransigence towards other peoples, and we too have a need for renewal in the spirit of national reconciliation.
It is the task of homes and schools to educate children in mutual kindness and helpfulness, in consideration for people, animals and plants, in truthful speech about others. A truthful teaching of history should teach the children about the growing community of work, about the growth of solidarity and the spirit of peace. In our country we have already made a beginning. In the Danish schools every first Monday in September, the day the delegates gather for the League of Nations meeting in Geneva, the older children are given an account of the efforts for peace that have led to the formation of the League of Nations, and the Ministry has sent to every school in the country a historical account of the peace efforts and of the League of Nations.
If there is a common cause for women of all classes and for women of all nations, it must be this: to form a circle around the school and join in the work to stop the sources that will poison our children’s minds with enthusiasm about the war. – I greet the Circles in Norway, Sweden and in my own country that will join in this work.
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