The Strangelove Legacy: Children, Parents and Teachers in the Nuclear Age.

The Strangelove Legacy: Children, Parents and Teachers in the Nuclear Age.

Remember the scene in Annie Hall where Woody Allen, then an adolescent, tells his family psychiatrist that the world will end in nuclear annihilation? Two decades worth of studies suggest that he spoke for more than a few scrawny kids in Brooklyn. Vast majorities of children claim to share his fear of nuclear war, and increasing numbers--a third of high school seniors, according to one poll--say they'll perish in one.

So what's a nucleo-neurotic kid to do? The debate over how to teach nuclear war to kids grew up right alongside the nuclear freeze movement during Reagan's first term. In 1983, the Massachusetts branch of the National Education Association teamed up with the Union of Concerned Scientists to produce "Choices"--a package of teaching materials that provided graphic detail of how many would be killed in a nuclear war. The American Federation of Teachers criticized the packet, as did President Reagan, who said the guide had the effect of "frightening and brainwashing American schoolchildren."

La Farge takes the left flank. A contributing editor of Parents magazine, she takes us to the kind of classrooms she would like to see teach kids about nuclear war, including a workshop at the 92nd Street "Y" in New York, where a circle of atom-anxious girls are "embracing the tiger." The leader tells them to imagine something they fear, then to "embrace it, draw it in, rest [their] hands on its shoulders." Next they pretend that they're holding the world--which proves too heavy for most of the girls, until the leader encourages them to scale things down. "For some," La Farge writes, "[the world] became no bigger than a tennis ball, lovingly cradled."

For La Farge these exercises are important avenues to "empowerment." Most children are so numbed by the nuclear threat that they've lost faith in their ability to affect it. "Nuclear-age education" should replace "survivalist" mentality and convince teens that they can still make a difference in an age of Stealth bombers, Midgetmen missiles, and Trident submarines.

But this conversion may require more than an imaginary communion with a jungle cat. La Farge calls on parents and teachers to explicitly convey the "destructiveness" of nuclear weapons. she argues strongly that this is apolitical, that it will allow children to decide for themselves the best way to prevent nuclear war. "The American ideal of freedom makes it unacceptable to inculcate a particular political viewpoint in the classroom," La Farge admits. but while this sounds like a neutral approach, it's not. If teachers discuss only the dangers of nuclear war, but do not, for instance, give mention to deterrence, then we've hardly enhanced students' capacity for independent thought. All we've done is frighten them. A balanced nuclear curriculum would include Jonathan Schell and Richard Perle.

Whatever her biases, La Farge does make it clear that our nuclear education is woefully inadequate. Recently, I discovered that several of my brighter students thought INF was football league and "deterrent" a laundry cleaner. The problem begins at home, La Farge writes, where the nuclear subject is so "anxiety-laden" that parents won't raise it. But parents and children rarely discuss even the most mundane public problems. I don't know many dads who sit junior on their lap for a father-and-son talk about reducing the deficit. There's no particular taboo on nuclear issues. Of course we should spend more time with our children and a host of other divisve questions they'll have to face. We should spend more time with them, period.