It occurred to me today watching the coverage of the Remembrance Day ceremony at the Cenotaph, that recently I have met a lot more people who are personally affected by the current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, either through the participation of friends or family members. Particularly I have been struck by the effect that this has on some of the children I was teaching earlier in the year.
For a lot of our Year 8 children (aged 12-13)this is the school year when War Poetry is studied - mostly of the First World War, but also touching on poetry in more recent conflicts - and through it they are taught about the horrors of war, and the pity of it, and of the immence incompetence and seemingly amoral heartlessness of those generals such as Haig who lead our conscripted army into battle. The overwhelming tenor of these studies is about the stupidity of warfare and the undeniably painful consequences for all concerned.
I found that many youngsters, particularly boys, at an age when they are struggling into the adult world find this line very hard to square with the idea that it is a good thing to sign up to serve your country. Many have brothers and sisters and cousins newly serving in various branches of the forces all over the world. Some are servicemen's children and others intending to serve themselves, in the relatively near future.
As a forces child myself, born after the end of the Second World War, I experienced a wall of silence about what had happened. Maybe, understandably after such a long conflict, people wanted to move on with life, to rebuild and to forget the horror. A whole new world seems to have rapidly emerged over the next twenty years so that much of life as it was pre-1939 is unrecognisable to us now.
It is just a very personal view that much of today's rampant materialism and neo-hedonism stems directly from the fact that we were not told about the huge sacrifice of nearly two million dead and many, many more injured which had just happened.
What we tell children and young people is of profound importance. They listen to what we say and are waiting for us to tell them truths about the world they live in. I believe that they only switch off when they find that no-one is talking to them. It isn't surely the responsibility only of our schools to talk about important issues; children deserve to have their questions answered by all of us adults who care about them.
I am sure that many of you who have children or grandchildren in the 12-13 age group, will know that the first task set in the study of War Poety is to go home and find out from the family whatever they can about the 2nd World War. I know that this task is becoming more and more fruitless, a combination of the wall of silence and the passage of time, but children are returning to the classroom with knowledge gleaned from television about the realities of War and they are struggling to make sense of it all.
They echo Owen's sentiment in questioning whether it is sweet and right to die for one's country, whilst those of us who teach poetry wonder how to answer the question.
