LEARNING ABOUT WAR

April 5, 1999
		How are students in the U.S. learning about their country's military action in Yugoslavia? Lee Hochberg of Oregon Public Broadcasting reports from Portland.

Strikes in Yugoslavia Coverage April 2, 1999: How Serbian Americans and Albanian Americans are watching the events in Yugoslavia April 2, 1999: Political reaction to the military action in Kosovo. Complete NewsHour coverage of Education   PBS TeacherSource The New York Times Kosovo Learning Guide Kosovo Human Rights Watch International Crisis Group	TOM McKENNA, High School Teacher: One of the things, obviously, we have to clear up is what is Kosovo? Is it a city? Is it a country? Why is it okay for American to drop bombs in another country? LEE HOCHBERG: Teachers across America have been asking questions like this since the NATO bombing started. Often they've gotten this type of answer. STUDENT: Isn't there like a guy that doesn't like the Kosovos or whatever and he's like murdering them?
	Invoking the memory of the Nazi Holocaust.
	LEE HOCHBERG: Social Studies Teacher Tom McKenna at Portland's Franklin High School says few of his students even know what NATO is, so helping them make sense of the Kosovo crisis has been confounding. TOM McKENNA: They don't have the background of knowledge that is necessary to be able to look at an historical event to understand what it means, very little, if any, world history, very little sense of where this place is or what it is. TOM McKENNA: (infront of classroom) Can anybody tell me anything that happened there in Bosnia, tell me anything at all that happened in Bosnia? LEE HOCHBERG: McKenna found he needed to invoke the memory of the Nazi Holocaust to make this latest ethnic cleansing tangible for students. TOM McKENNA: (teaching students) How many people here have studied the Holocaust? STUDENT: I have. TOM McKENNA: Given that, just imagine that, you know, atrocities are being committed against human beings. The Yugoslav Army along with the Serbian police and paramilitary groups are going into Albanian communities, committing acts of rape and murder against people because they've committed the crime of being of a certain ethnic group. STUDENT: So this is just like what happened in the Holocaust? TOM McKENNA: Well, it has that capability for sure.
	Scary stories from a distant land.
	LEE HOCHBERG: Younger children at Portland's Chapman Elementary School were also trying to understand the crisis. STUDENT: It's so much like the Holocaust, it's really scary. People must just be traumatized for life because, you know, they're being threatened. JIM MANGAN, Elementary School Teacher: They do relate it to the Holocaust and Hitler, and you know especially the Jewish students in this classroom, you know, feel very strongly and they certainly know their history. REPORTER ON TV: Refugees collect food collected from people who live there. That's where we found 12-year-old, Dejan. Serbs forced him at gun point from his home and then burnt it to the ground. LEE HOCHBERG: These fourth and fifth graders say they've learned a lot about Kosovo in the last week from television, the Internet, and their parents. They've been haunted by tragic stories of Kosovans their age. STUDENT: My mom told me that she heard on the news that the Serbs killed the teacher right in front of her students. And that would be gross. STUDENT: Some people have like seen their parents being killed and a lot of stuff that is just very scary. STUDENT: They get put in trucks with blankets, but it looks like it is really cold weather there and they're still cold with the blankets. And, if I was forced out of my home, I'd be terrified. I wouldn't know what to do; I wouldn't know where to go. LEE HOCHBERG: For all their innocence, some students in a few short days of study developed critical opinions about NATO bombing. JIM MANGAN: Is it peace making? Is that going to promote peace or not? STUDENT: I don't think it's working that well, and I don't think it's promoting too much peace to the ethnic Albanians because they're still making them flee. STUDENT: They're bombing because they want Slobodan Milosevic to stop killing the ethnic Albanians. And so the effect of that is he's killing more ethnic Albanians. LEE HOCHBERG: The children learned from their teachers that World War I broke out in this region of Europe. They fear the new Balkan conflict could lead to another world war. STUDENT: If it did turn into a World War III, would they start bombing around Oregon? STUDENT: I'm scared because I could lose my house, so could a lot of my friends, my uncles, my aunts. JIM MANGAN: There's no way that really your home is in risk of being bombed at this time. But it's a fear that it could spread. And so, I mean, being afraid of war is a definite valid thing. I mean, I am. LEE HOCHBERG: Still teacher Mangan taught his students that ignoring violence can pave the way for more violence. JIM MANGAN: Look at the ethnic cleansing, the genocide. We're going to ignore this? We learned no lessons from Hitler? We can't do that.
	Learning not to demonize your enemies.
	LEE HOCHBERG: At St. Mary's Academy, a Catholic girls' high school, the message was different. Pupils there were urged to reject comparisons between Hitler and Yugoslav President Milosevic. MINDY MORTON, High School Teacher: The whole idea is that propaganda where you demonize the other guy so that we all him Hitler and he calls us Hitler. Or they had big signs the other day saying that Clinton was Dracula. LEE HOCHBERG: Students in this junior and senior level government class discussed the propaganda war that could accompany the Kosovo conflict. MINDY MORTON: The Serbs aren't all monsters, and, you know, they're not all involved in the ethnic cleansing. And I don't want my students to characterize them as monsters. If we make them Nazis, then it is okay to do whatever we want to do to them. You don't demonize your opponents.
	For Muslims the war is personal and painful.
	TEACHER: Now where is Kosovo? STUDENT: Kosovo's in Yugoslavia. And I think that the Serbian leader - I think that he's a really bad person because he's people. LEE HOCHBERG: Portland Muslims, for whom the war, thousands of miles away, is personal and painful, have taught their students about demons. WASA SUBHI, Teacher: There's rules on Earth. This is not jungle, and you have to think before you start just killing the people for land or whatever he wants. TEACHER: A lot of people that are being killed are who? Fatima. STUDENT: The ones who are getting killed are Muslims. TEACHER: A lot of the people are Muslim, huh? STUDENT: In the news, I mean, I saw a girl and she said they said if you stay here for one more day, we're going to cut your whole neck. LEE HOCHBERG: At Portland's private Islamic school, these children-- grades one to four-- also learned about heroes. TEACHER: What does NATO stand for? What is NATO? STUDENT: NATO is the people who say that this is not right. You are not supposed to fight with innocent people. LEE HOCHBERG: But thankful as they are for NATO's intervention, even these Muslims wondered if bombing is the way to peace. STUDENT: They're making it worse because dropping bombs would probably hurt the Muslims and stuff like that and make them die. TEACHER: How can we help without hurting? Sometimes it's really hard to do both. LEE HOCHBERG: A perplexing lesson for these brand-new students of an age-old conflict.

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