Education in Wartime

May 6, 2009 - During World War II, schoolchildren planted Victory Gardens and collected old tires and cans to support the war effort. Baby boomers ducked under their school desks as sirens blared, a Cold War drill to prepare them for future nuclear attack.

A generation later, America responded to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, with similar displays of unity and urgency. This is typical of the way democracies respond to war and conflict, asserts GSE assistant professor Sigal Ben-Porath, in her book Citizenship Under Fire: Democratic Education in Times of Conflict. Citing examples from the United States and her native Israel, Ben-Porath observes that in wartime, the very definition of what it means to be a citizen changes. Priorities shift. Security takes precedence over individual rights; solidarity overrides diversity. In short, a democracy in wartime often compromises the values most cherished in times of peace; Ben-Porath calls this phenomenon "belligerent citizenship."

Societies in times of conflict must balance the temporary, pressing needs of wartime with the enduring need to preserve democratic values. Without a conscious effort to recognize the problems inherent in belligerent citizenship, Ben-Porath argues, war will repeat, generation after generation.

No sphere is more vulnerable to these changes than a nation's classrooms, where the values of belligerent citizenship are instilled — intentionally or inadvertently — in future citizens. Rather than teaching students to be active and equal participants in the democratic process, public education becomes, in Ben-Porath's phrase, "war by other means."

Ben-Porath advocates "expansive education," public education focused on engaging citizens in preserving democracy.  Wartime, much more than peacetime, provides the ideal opportunity to engage students in the democratic process and to become more active citizens. Recasting a patriotic emphasis on national identity into a notion of "shared fate," for example, is one way of transforming the more harmful and destructive tendencies of belligerent citizenship into a more inclusive and active view of civic participation.

And public education is society's best tool for effecting such transformations. Education, with "one leg in the present and its other leg in the future," she says, "is always, at least potentially, an agent for change." Yet schools, Ben-Porath believes, don't usually go far enough in their civics lessons or take seriously enough their fundamental role in raising tomorrow's citizenry.

Expansive education, then, is civic education during wartime aimed at strengthening democratic values, skills, and practices. Expansive education reaches out to include more voices, more opinions, more citizens, especially those belonging to groups marginalized in times of national solidarity. Ben-Porath seeks models for expansive education in the fields of peace education, feminist pedagogy, and multicultural education, drawing on the strengths of each.

Despite all she has witnessed in Israel and the United States, she remains an optimist. "Political education is our single most important hope for attaining this worthy goal," Ben-Porath explains. "And our schools, as underfunded, over-stretched, and undervalued as they are, are our best bet."