We cannot shield children from history. In Ukraine, millions of families have lost their homes to Vladimir Putin’s war. In Delhi, record shattering temperatures of 50C saw kids locked inside this summer, unable to study or play. Global food prices are soaring, causing children all over the world to go hungry. So, surely it is inevitable that the next generation want to confront the big questions: why are there wars? What is our place in nature? What is money and why is it so important?
Often, children take these questions far more seriously than grownups. They question things that adults take for granted. Adults might find it annoying when a child replies “why?” to our every answer. But typically, the child is just trying to get to the bottom of things in a way that adults have long stopped doing.
Another thing we cannot shield children from is exposure to false historical narrative. From a very early age, the young are bombarded with myths and disinformation, not just about current events, but also about the basic storyline of humanity itself – who we are, where we come from and how we got here.
In my home country of Israel, for example, even secular schoolchildren typically learn about the Garden of Eden and see colourful images of Noah’s Ark long before they hear about Neanderthals or see the cave art of Lascaux and Sulawesi. This has an impact. It’s possible to trace a direct line from the Genesis decree of “fill the earth and subdue it” to the Industrial Revolution and today’s ecological crisis. Another direct line of influence can be drawn from the historical narratives Russian children learn in school, to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and the ensuing global food crisis.
If we abandon children to myths, unlearning these ideas later in life is a difficult, sometimes impossible, task. It’s vital we talk with kids openly about the big issues in a responsible, scientific way based on evidence, rather than dogmatic faith. This is a challenge I myself have wrestled with recently when writing the history of the world for children.
What I’ve learned from this project is that addressing the big issues for children is a delicate job. Some subjects are fun, like exploring the daily lives of stone age hunter-gatherers, when people lived in the wild and kids spent their days learning to climb trees, track animals and make fire. But other subjects are more challenging. Examining what happened when ancient Sapiens met Neanderthals, for example, leads us to discuss what life might have been like for a child with a Sapiens mother and a Neanderthal father, bringing up subjects such as racism, war, genocide and extinction.
It’s crucial to talk about the dark side of history, but how do we avoid paralysing children with fear? One guiding principle is that we should wait to share explicit descriptions of horrors until the listener is mature enough to handle them. Instead, when dealing with calamities and injustices, it is best to emphasise agency: no matter how terrible things are, people can usually make a change for the better. That’s not wishful thinking, but the very essence of history. After all, history is not the study of the past, or simply a list of wars and disasters and dead kings who ruled thousands of years ago. History is the study of how things change.
If we think the world has always been the same, and that how we live now is the only way for humans to live, then it’s natural to feel that change is impossible and that the problems we face are unsolvable. Even if things are very unfair, what can we do? That’s just how the world is, we tell ourselves. But by studying history we learn that humans didn’t always live like we do, and that the world is changing all the time. People made the world what it is – and people can therefore change it. Of course, that’s no easy task, but it’s been done many times before.
That’s why history is so powerful. It is the key to changing the world. So much so that, in many places, governments are afraid of history. Leaders seldom ban people from learning mathematics or physics. But many governments forbid people – and especially young people – from learning at least certain parts of history. It all goes back to those dead kings who ruled thousands of years ago, their icy hands reaching out from beyond the grave to grasp our minds and freeze change.
After all, it was those long-dead kings who invented and spread various stories about gods, nations, money and love that so many people today still believe and adhere to. To gain some freedom from these narratives and behave differently we need to understand how they were created and spread in the first place. Otherwise, we will never see them for what they are: just stories. Children asking “why?” are a powerful force that can rock these old tales to their foundations.
But in addition to avoiding terror, we should also be careful to avoid burdening the young with our own responsibilities. The oldest sin in the grownup’s playbook is to expect kids to take on our projects, and in particular, to solve the problems we want solved – but haven’t figured out how. When talking with children about big issues, we should, every now and then, ask ourselves why we are really doing it.
Every person in the world carries a heavy burden. When we teach history to young people, we sometimes do it in order to shift some of our burden on to the shoulders of the next generation. We want the young to keep carrying the beliefs, the memories, the identities and the conflicts that have weighed on us throughout our lives. “Here, kid, I carried these things up to this point – now it’s your turn!”
That’s unfair. A far better reason to teach history is to help liberate kids from at least some of their fears, illusions and hatreds. “See these things, kid? I got stuck with them for years, and they made me miserable. Be careful! You don’t have to pick them up, too!”
I hope history becomes a tool to free people rather than bind them. A tool to forge new concords rather than perpetuate old conflicts. After all, the point of learning history is not to remember the past, but to be liberated from it.
Unstoppable Us: How Humans Took Over the World by Yuval Noah Harari is published on 20 October
