MUST BEGIN IN THE SCHOOLS
All movements that succeed start in the schools. It is in the schools of the world that the peace movement will succeed or fail. If the old style militant nationalism continues to be taught there—the arrogance, the hate of past days—there is no hope.
Hate is being taught now in the schools of every land and sometimes it is called patriotism. For myself, I learned to love France and to hate England as a schoolboy, through the lessons of the Revolutionary War. These lessons could have been taught without breeding hate, I think; but they weren’t.
South and North have not yet agreed on a history of the United States. Both are handing down from generation to generation the animosities of the Civil War by using different textbooks with utterly different viewpoints. They call this loyalty. It is loyalty to the past but not to the future. The future demands that the glorification of war with its hatreds shall cease.