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.