After Ronald Reagan was elected President in 1980, a motley collection of pacifists and refugees from the Vietnam demonstrations of the 1970s coalesced in a campaign for a “nuclear freeze.” They thought they could parlay their victories in referenda in half a dozen states in the November 1982 elections into a national impact in Congress.
But their much-publicized freeze demonstration on March 7-8, 1983, on the U.S. Capitol steps was a flop. After they were exposed as just a sophisticated lobbying campaign stage-managed by a handful of professionals, the freeze movement petered out. Having failed to sell their notions to adults, they decided to work on the next generation.
Their main goal then became instituting courses in nuclear war in the public schools. At least four nuclear war curricula were written and made available for the school year starting in 1983. But most schools didn’t take the bait.
After public school principals and teachers showed their reluctance to displace academic subjects with these experimental courses, the freezeniks decided to compel schools to teach nuclear war, whether they want it or not.
The game plan was laid out by an outfit called Educators for Social Responsibility, headquartered in Cambridge, Mass. ESR brags that it “has almost single-handedly brought the discussion of peace and the nuclear arms race into schools … not just liberal eastern schools, but public schools in traditional communities of the south and midwest.”
ESR boasts that it was responsible for the nuclear education resolutions passed by various school boards in California and Maryland, which mandated courses “throughout entire school systems.”
ESR explains its strategy in a fund-raising letter mailed widely in the summer of 1985. “A parent or school board member gets information from a local ESR chapter or the national office. Then a presentation on nuclear education is requested for consideration by the school board. Finally, the school board recommends that the schools, administrators and teachers make nuclear age education part of the curriculum.”
The ESR fund-raiser brags that “ESR is often cited as the best authority and resource for teaching guides, curricula, and teacher training.” In fact, some school boards (such as San Francisco) specifically mention ESR in the resolution mandating a nuclear war curriculum.
The ESR letter states bluntly that its goal is “an informed and active citizenry similar to that envisioned by the American philosopher and educator John Dewey.” The activism which John Dewey called for was that “the schools should consciously be partners in the construction of a changed society.”
In other words, nuclear war courses are designed as instruments of social change.
ESR brags that “one year ago they [these resolutions] would never have happened. But now things are different and change is rapidly overtaking the country.”
In Napa, California, parents are objecting vigorously to the school board’s decision to institute a nuclear age curriculum for Kindergarten through 12th grade. The parents assert that the school board decision was the result of pressure from nuclear freeze agitators, was rammed through without a fair debate, constitutes “brainwashing or mind alteration” of the pupils, and has caused a “curriculum of redundancy and a community torn apart.”
A just-published book called “Educating for Disaster” by Thomas B. Smith does a much-needed job of unraveling the interlocking network of organizations which wrote the several nuclear war curricula now being foisted off on public schools through the political pressure tactics of Educators for Social Responsibility. Smith also describes how the nuclear freezeniks work through the churches and the schools to scare little children and brainwash them into accepting the psychology of despair and the politics of disarmament.
When Jimmy Carter said in his famous debate with Ronald Reagan in the 1980 campaign that his 13-year-old daughter Amy was worried about “proliferation,” the voters laughed him to scorn. People who have children know that normal 13-year-olds are not thinking about proliferation, or even about nuclear weapons at all, unless some adult has deliberately fomented those fears. That’s what the nuclear war courses are designed to do.
