Ideas need to be mobilised if the learning years are safeguarded, writes Simon Schama.

Peshawar? So 2014. So last year. No it isn’t. Peshawar is forever. If the world has any conscience and any courage, the screams of those children, the bravery of their teachers, the inhuman vileness of their butchers who drag terrified boys and girls from under benches to be riddled with bullets and force them to watch as a teacher burns alive, all the while shouting “God is Great”, will be remembered every December 16, our new “day of infamy”.

Like many of you I bow my head in silence on November 11 to honour the First World War dead. But those sacrifices and slaughters were a century ago. Peshawar is now. And you and I know, in the depths of our sinking hearts, that there will be endless Peshawars to come.

For it is the measure of the depths to which our barbarous, benighted age has sunk that we have allowed schools to become a war zone. Education, the idea of teaching our children something other than the parroting of sacred texts, has become a target. Cravenly, we do not defend it — the right to education on which our freedom rests, our legacy from John Locke, Mary Wollstonecraft and the rest; the sacred idea of a leading forth (in Latin, educare) of our children’s inquiring minds. After the standard professions of shock and piety we resume our shopping, even as the first condition of schooling — its safety — has been violated.

How and when did we allow this to happen? The first onslaught was 10 years ago at Beslan in the autonomous Russian republic of North Ossetia, when the shock troops of Chechen separatist Shamil Basayev took a school hostage to demand Russian withdrawal from Chechnya and UN recognition of that republic. The result was 385 dead, overwhelmingly children, when Russian commandos stormed the school.

But in that horror, the enemy designated by the terrorists was not the concept of education itself, and the children hungry for it. The innocents of the classroom were collateral victims of fanaticism about something else: militant nationalism.

Nonetheless Beslan set an example of massacre by indifference to the precious lives of schoolchildren; the militarisation of the classroom and the playground, a callousness that shows no sign of abating. It was atrocious for Hamas knowingly to store weapons and rockets in or next to Gaza schools during this year’s war with Israel; but it was also atrocious for the Israelis to attack those schools.

Local resentment in Jordan and Lebanon at the presence of hundreds of thousands of traumatised young Syrian refugees has turned so chronically violent that half of those children no longer attempt to go to school or do so in a state of daily siege.

Even so the web page of UNHCR, the UN’s refugee agency, is filled with moving stories of Syrian parents — many with little schooling themselves — finding ways for their children not to lose the precious years of education and their dreams of a better life.

The weaponisation of schooling is not just a Middle East story. The bloodstains of the slaughtered at Sandy Hook elementary school in Connecticut had barely been scrubbed away before Wayne LaPierre, executive vice-president of the National Rifle Association — before which almost every American politician genuflects — opined that the problem with America’s schools was the absence of guns. Arm teachers, instruct them to blaze away at an incoming lunatic, let the bullets fly over the heads of cowering nine-year-olds and the bad guys will drop before they can do harm — despite the fact that the 1999 massacre at Columbine, Colorado, happened at a school with an armed guard. This is yet another instance of the classroom as an extension of the nightmares of the adult world rather than a sanctuary.

It has grown worse. The attempted murder of Malala Yousafzai on a school bus; the abduction and forced conversion of the girls of Chibok in northern Nigeria by Boko Haram, those warriors for ignorance; the sexual enslavement of Yazidi girls by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or Isis; and finally the Peshawar bloodbath — all are different in kind from the victimisation of children in other kinds of conflict.

They arise from an all-out war on education itself, especially of girls. The aim is to take girls as sexual property, mutilated, masked, kept in domestic serfdom and captive ignorance for the rest of their days. And of course the jailers and murderers of children are right to be frightened of free and curious minds brought to flower by devoted teaching since they threaten the tyranny — physical, intellectual and spiritual — that presumptuously self-described Islamist jihadis impose on their terrorised populations.

Now, it would be good to believe that, ultimately, the armies fighting for illiteracy will be defeated, for you cannot behead ideas. But those ideas need to be mobilised if whole populations of children are not to be lost to the learning years. The drones of destruction will be less decisive in this war than Wollstonecraft’s Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, her A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.

We need to declare, as loudly and as often as it takes, that no school of any kind can ever be haram. Education is education for every child on earth — and wherever the black flag of fear and ignorance is raised we, on our side, for our children’s sake, will lift the defiant banner of universal and unfettered enlightenment.

Written by Simon Schama: the writer is an FT contributing editor.
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/5307d...#axzz3NUe2oecR