Teaching Hatred

We turn now to egregious examples of ways that education can be used to instill hatred, with the help of authoritarian states and fanatical leaders (either theological or secular) who shape children’s lives. There have been vivid examples of this throughout the twentieth century. The twenty-first century starts with the dramatic case of some Islamic fundamentalist schools that follow in this tradition of molding the lives of children for careers of hatred and violence.We describe these examples to provide a sharp contrast to the remainder of this book. Our fundamental aspiration is to inspire educators and leaders to embrace the important alternative role of education in fostering prosocial, empathic, and cooperative behavior—with insight into the destructive forces of human experience—that can provide the basis for a peaceful world in the long run. To be effective, we must address the obstacles to education in constructing such programs. Children can be brought up to hate, to condone killing, and even to participate in killing. That experiment has been done repeatedly. In the rest of this book, let us look briefly at examples of this destructive educational experience and then at the other side of the coin—learning to live together peacefully. The human capacity to shape child and adolescent development toward a pervasive culture of hatred and violence was vividly demonstrated by the Nazi experience. The his- torian Klaus Fischer writes on youth and education, and women and the family, in his book Nazi Germany—A New History. We begin with the origin of youth groups as a countercultural protest and move to the creation of the Hitler Youth movement and ways in which it exploited these relatively innocent youthful protests. Nazi education, its philosophy, and the creation of elite schools are described in terms of their attempt to shape the minds and bodies of boys toward devotion to the Führer and toward their future as Nazi leaders. Teachers, as well, were indoctrinated and obligated to behave in a prescribed manner toward the same end. The family, particularly the woman’s role in it, was seen as the social underpinning of society. The Nazi glorification of motherhood and the family was a means of creating more children to serve Hitler and the Nazi regime.