Teaching in a Time of War, Part 2 (1).

For all the immediate shock, fear, paralyzing awe, and vindictive anger stirred up in response to the Al Qaeda attacks of 9/11, the most significant effects of that dramatic display of violence are long term. As the United States government would have it, these attacks triggered the chain of events we are now living through, including the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and, more broadly and ominously, a declaration of "war" against some iii defined notion of "terrorism." These particular developments signal an even more encompassing history-in-the-making that concerns the United States' hegemony. For all the flag waving around claims of "freedom," "democracy," "homeland security," and "the American way," the most truly pressing aspects of the "wars" this country is currently waging are the implications for the global politics and economies the United States is striving to bring under its control.

As Pam Annas and myself, the co-editors of this issue, already suggested in our introduction to Radical Teacher's first cluster of articles on the subject of "Teaching in Time of War" (RT #72), these developments are hardly new. They are just more brazenly explicit. Even the supposedly new strategy of "pre-emptive strikes" merely provides a name for the kinds of interventions the United States initiated under cover, unobtrusively, in Latin America, Africa, and elsewhere without giving them a name. Indeed, the very concept of "war" is itself questionable in this context, which is why the word is in quotation marks here. Conventional wars, labeled as such, are still being fought globally as either national or civil conflicts that involve organized armies, territories, treaties, borders, and the like. Some are fought by nation-states while others involve ethnic/tribal/religious groups. Either way, the net result is not that far from what we already know from our history books. In this respect, the United States' invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq are just the latest in a chain of conventional wars.

What is new and even baffling is the concept of a "war on terrorism." The means, we can see, are old and tragically familiar, but the verbiage stuns the mind. As a war on an abstraction--and that is what a war on terrorism is--the United States' present engagements in the Middle East come across as a rhetorical flourish that depends on the misalignment of language and actuality, theory and practice. When politicians speak of a "war on drugs," or the "war on crime," or even, in their better moments, a "war on poverty," they do so to signal determination, urgency, and an unshakable refusal to compromise. Yet when it comes to actual results, such rousing figures of speech have a dismal track record. As metaphoric constructs they imply drastic and supposedly positive steps, except that such verbal gesticulation does not bind the speakers to literally take on a concerted national commitment to military action in the sense that wars between sovereign nations usually imply. The very fuzziness of the word "war," and indeed the impossibility of waging it against an abstraction such as "crime" or "terrorism," creates a climate of irresponsibility at best and a free-for-all at worst.

George Orwell's essay, "Shooting an Elephant," highlights this distinction as Orwell attempts to sort out his own evolving political stance towards serving the empire that was paying him his monthly salary at the time. Feeling trapped in his position as a hated British policeman in an occupied country, he writes of hating the British Raj but also of his rage against the Burmese ("evil-spirited little beasts"). He thinks of the Raj as a tyranny, as "something" clamped down on the prostrate people, but he also thinks that "the greatest joy would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest's guts" (italics mine). (2)

Hating the Raj, or an "evil regime," or an "axis of evil" is an abstraction. Sticking a bayonet in any living creature's guts is concrete. It is tactile, bloody, cruel, and deadly. War clearly entails the latter. We at the home front may try not to think about it too much. (3) We may prefer to have our media edit out the most horrific images and censor the most stomach-turning accounts--the scattered body parts, the screams of anguish, the rotting flesh, and the decades of suffering that follow from a house turned into rubble. The media may ignore government pressure and give us body counts, but unless we experience the horrors of war directly, without mediation, we cannot fully grasp what it means to live in time of war and, most importantly, with its long term consequences.

Certainly the widely disseminated images of New York's World Trade Center bursting into an apocalyptic cloud of smoke and flame have become iconic in the United States and beyond. Ironically, these images were amenable to becoming iconic precisely because, much like visual documentation of aerial bombings, they are at once visually powerful and keep viewers at a distance. Less dramatic but much more important are the subterranean developments of ideologies and power relations that flow from these images--both the suffering of those affected and the politics now at work configuring and reconfiguring Western and specifically the United States' global hegemony. Though the events of 9/11 accelerated and made visible this push to power, it has been going on for a while. What is new about the images, the language, and the public's understanding of the current "war" is the obfuscating role of the malleable and heavily coded abstractions ("clash of civilizations," "evil," "terrorism," etc.) that the government and the media pass off as reasoned arguments for military action. (4)

Not surprisingly, Radical Teacher's first cluster of articles about teaching in a time of war (#72) responded to the immediacy of the crisis created by 9/11 as that crisis was experienced in American classrooms. Issues of media manipulations, nationalist jingoism, and students' inchoate fears in the face of a menace they were iii prepared to understand figured prominently in that issue. Three of those articles concerned rhetoric and two more concerned the building of ideological consensus in response to the crisis embodied by the al Qaeda attacks. Running through those articles was a shared analysis of the relations among media, culture, discourse, and ideology. As Pam and I noted in our introduction: "The articles included in this cluster tell a complex story of ignorance, bewilderment, avoidance, and fear." Singly and together, they illuminate ways such emotions have been shaping a national narrative (or at least Washington's) about the traumas we have been experiencing--and inflicting!--in anticipation of more to come.

For all their diversity, the teaching situations discussed in the articles gathered in "Teaching in a Time of War II" have two things in common which at once link them to the preceding "war" cluster and head elsewhere. These new essays, too, are deeply aware of ways normative ideology impacts the classroom, and they similarly strive to offer students the critical tools by which they may reposition themselves more powerfully and autonomously in relation to the acts of aggression imposed on them by their respective circumstances. As with the preceding duster, the present articles also concern teachers' efforts to ground students in the understanding that they can read through the obfuscations and misrepresentations that saturate their worlds.

While the ability to see through deception does not in itself make anyone's life safer from the impact of war, the teaching charted by all the essays included here seeks to free us to envision new possibilities despite the grinding realities of the wars now being waged globally. Most importantly, as an orientation towards knowledge, these essays concern approaches to teaching that may counter communal collapse into despair and irrational anger by generating constructive new perspectives, even regarding wars that do not seem to have an end in sight. They present reconfigurations of paradigms and explore ways teachers may encourage their students to imagine new possibilities and strive to act on them, too.

Three of the essays that appear below reflect concretely on just such a situation. Offering us perspectives on educational work that took place in Israel and Palestine, they literally engage with the immediate challenges of teaching not only during a time of war, but in a place of war. Eleanor Roffman analyzes her experience as an American, feminist outsider teaching adult Israeli women a course that questions the country's normalization of war. Writing from a pacifist, "refuser" perspective, Rotem Mor describes workshops for Israeli high school students contemplating the draft and draft resistance ("refusal"). (5) Yamila Hussein--a Palestinian who came of age during the first Intifada (the Palestinian popular uprising of the 1980s), and who is now revisiting that experience as an education professional--discusses Palestinian grassroots educational efforts K-12 as these emerged in response to Israeli-imposed school closures.

In these three cases teaching occurred literally "under fire," as Roffman puts it. They concern educational challenges that are directly bound up in the actual, visceral experience of war. As these three essays suggest, the stakes for understanding the warfare that engages each of these communities of learners and teachers are extremely high, involving nothing less than national and even personal survival. Furthermore, as these articles also show, the primal need to survive they address is intertwined with other crucial needs: loyalty, dignity, nurture, and the sense that one's self-respect is bound up in communal claims of decency and accountability.

These three essays make concrete the issues that teachers in the United States, even those teaching near New York's World Trade Center, do not necessarily pause to consider. For us, even the topic of teaching in a time of war is relatively abstract. We may call the inner city "a war zone," but the intent is metaphoric. For many of us "war" takes place elsewhere--in the Philippines, Korea, Vietnam, Kuweit.... Some of our students and their families may have come to this country from Cambodia, Sudan, Beirut or Iraq. Some may eventually find themselves in Fallujah or Iqrit or the caves of eastern Afghanistan, and some may have returned from there. But most of our students experience military violence only as mediated by their television screens, recalled from childhood games, and fetishized with trendy consumer goods like humvees and camouflage attire. For them, the impulse Orwell has to stick his bayonet in a Burmese's gut is still theoretical. It has more to do with flags and decals than with actual experience as soldiers and civilians living jointly under fire.

Focusing on teaching in a place of war, the three essays that discuss education in the Israeli/Palestinian context bring into sharp focus the contingencies that can impinge on teaching against war and for peace in their particular circumstances. Each of them includes awareness of the formative effects of media and other collective expressions of ideology, but each recognizes also the significant role families and communities have in creating a climate for an education that can lead to political change. This may be less obvious in Hussein's essay that, understandably, concerns itself especially with efforts to protect and sustain Palestinian education in face of the threats to its very existence, but even under those trying circumstances, the potential of grassroots education to foster new perspectives and new action is poignantly evident. The fact that Roffman and Mor are able to consider education for peace at all reflects the luxury that Israelis enjoy because of their power and relative sense of security.

This suggestion that education for peace is a luxury is not an axiomatic truth. It may seem such in situations of active fighting, when survival is the foremost concern. The "luxury" to which we referred above is only in the eye of the beholder--those who make space for such teaching as a deviation from the supposedly "primary" task (or curriculum) at hand. Roffman's and Mor's efforts are not standard fare in Israel, and the efforts Hussein describes were effectively quashed by the Israeli occupation as well as by misgivings in some Palestinian quarters.

Mor's article includes an anecdote that also brings up and ultimately leaves unresolved this dilemma of educating for peace. It concerns an Ethiopian (i.e. ethnically disenfranchised immigrant) Israeli soldier torn between the ethical claims of Palestinians needing to go through a roadblock and his response to them throwing stones at him after he opened the gate. His situation resembles Orwell's in "Shooting an Elephant." It is a no-win situation, inherent in the relations of occupier/occupied and reiterated in the daily reports of violence we are getting from Iraq and elsewhere, regardless of the decency or wickedness of the individuals involved. It is a dilemma that supports curricular emphasis on transforming the ways we frame our understanding of war and its resolution.

J. Elizabeth Clark's discussion of teaching poetry via the web site of "Poets Against the War" exists in this context. At issue in her essay is the role of the imagination in freeing us to re-articulate and, so, re-conceive ways we may understand and reshape our world. Clark's essay begins to suggest the role of imaginative discourse as a key to political change.

In its focus on educational issues that respond specifically to the Al Quaeda attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, Rita Verma's article revisits issues raised in Radical Teacher #72. Focused on anti-Arab and anti-Moslem racism in a New York public school, Verma describes a teaching unit which charts for students a path towards a clearer understanding of their own capacity for racism as it is produced by national discourses of otherness. Her emphasis on ways teachers may challenge the construction of prejudice speaks to concerns threaded through the entire cluster--notably the recognition that people's subaltern positions make them all the more susceptible to becoming extensions of war effort as well as its most available victims.

This recognition runs through all the current articles. Hussein's discussion includes awareness of ways social class impacts Palestinians' access to educational privileges. Clark teaches poetry in a course that has social transformation, including class and gender awareness, as its primary agenda. Roffman discusses her students' female gender as it prescribes their place within Israel's intensely masculinist and militarized culture. Finally, while Mor's seminars are also implicated in issues of gender (Israel's universal draft impacts males in particular), they, like Roffman's course, tap ethnicity and social class as forms of privilege.

Though attention to class, gender, ethnicity, and other aspects of social positionality is always helpful in specifying teaching and learning situations, in this cluster, where the focus is on teaching in the context of war, this awareness is all the more important. The ways communities may "other" or embrace those who are outsiders--be it Sikhs and Arabs in an urban American setting, ethnic minorities in a pacifist seminar in Israel, or girls in an improvised Palestinian village school--translate into how people "other" the "enemy." It is the process of othering that creates enemies.

One remarkable attempt to confront such othering is the Israeli/Palestinian village of Neve Shalom/Wahat al Salam (Oasis of Peace). Founded in 1972 and a Nobel Peace Prize nominee, this village has been working communally to forge viable modes of co-existence, including running a bilingual and bicultural school for its children and a Peace School (established in 1976) that offers training to outsiders. Israeli and Palestinian Identities in Dialogue (6) discusses the theory and the practice informing the school's work with a range of children and adults, lay people and for professionals, who participate in bi-national dialogue groups or guide them.

While this project sets an encouraging example of possibilities for peace even in cases as seemingly intractable as the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, the insights it offers into analogous issues in our own world are an added benefit. Its emphasis on cross-cultural encounter as an educational approach is partly home grown, but it is also informed by educational thought abroad, including the writing of Paolo Freire and research by J.E. Helms on racial identity in the United States. Most importantly, the Peace School respects collective identities and group singularity as a basis for dialogues that replace "otherness" with recognition. It recognizes the burden of "double identity" ("double consciousness" for W.E.B. DuBois) as an active aspect of conflict, and the crucial role of self-knowledge, integrity, and dignity in freeing people to renegotiate across differences.

In sharp contrast with the dialogues proposed in this book is the trajectory taken by the young lives depicted in the film Arna's Children (reviewed in this issue of Radical Teacher by Israeli writer and activist, Uri Avneri). (7) If Identities in Dialogue demonstrates possibilities for contact and recovery, Arna's Children documents a horrifying progression towards demolition--demolition of both the self and the other. It fulfills the prophecy latent in Hussein's article that brutalizing conditions will indeed turn imaginative and playful children into fighters and martyrs. In one scene in the film a child is acting as his English teacher: he walks into the "classroom," makes sure the children greet him respectfully, asks a question, and then, in short order, proceeds to beat up an "unruly" student. The normalcy of violence the film documents is overwhelming. Violence is embedded in the banality of daily life under occupation. Here there is no space for a seminar such as Mor describes.

In the context of the articles gathered here, with their emphasis on keeping minds open to new configurations of understanding, Arna's Children offers a sobering insight into the enormity of the task. But spaces of resistance do exist, as Clark reminds us, and as all the essays collected here demonstrate. As the United States moves into protracted states of unspecified warfare against ill defined, abstract "enemies," we need to move beyond the shock of 9/11 and the ratcheted up emotions it created, towards teaching that takes into account the long haul.

(1) As initially conceived, this cluster was to include one additional essay, Laurie Fuller's discussion of teaching Starhawk's utopian fiction, The Fifth Sacred Thing, in the feminist classroom. Though for reasons of space we were unable to include this essay (it is forthcoming in another issue of Radical Teacher), we mention it here because we consider its discussion of imaginative discourse, together with Clark's essay on poetry (in this issue), as two "book ends" for the present cluster.

(2) George Orwell, "Shooting a Elephant," Collected Essays. New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1954, p.155.

(3) Cf. Joseph Conrad's dismaying caution that "The conquest of the earth ... is not a pretty thing when you look at it too much ..." The Heart of Darkness. New York: Signet, 1950, p.69. Italics added.

(4) "Political language," Orwell writes, "is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind." "Politics and the English Language," Ibid. p.177.

(5) www.refusersolidarity.net

(6) Israeli And Palestinian Identities In Dialogue; The School for Peace Approach. Rabah Halabi, ed. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2004. Also www. oasisofpeace.org

(7) Arna's Children is available for purchase on DVD via www.arna.info and www.andalus.co.il See also Promises (re. Palestinian and Israeli children living in and around Jerusalem in the 1990s) distributed by the New Zealand Film Festival Trust: www.promisesproject.org. Both documentaries are longitudinal, exploring the war's effects on children over time.