From the Head of School

 Peace Day

The Jungle Book has been a popular children’s story for over a hundred years.  Mowgli, a ‘man cub’ is raised in the jungle by friendly animals.  On the eve of his adolescence danger lurks as Shere Khan, the tiger, looks to return after many years of absence.  Shere Khan hates humans and the other animals know Mowgli will no longer be safe among them.

Jungle Book was written by a British author, Rudyard Kipling, at the height of the British empire.  Kipling gloried in empire and the martial qualities that created and maintained it.  He wasn’t alone; children grew up with stories about heroic deeds in battle and the greatness of military figures.They also learnt that some ways of life were better than others; and some peoples superior.

So much so that it became part of a culture’s unsaid assumptions.  On the eve of World War One, Kipling wrote a poem for young men, not much older than his audience for the Jungle Book: “For all we have and are, / For all our children’s fate, / Stand up and take the war, / The Hun is at the gate!”

One of those young men, Rupert Brook, looking forward to the same war, wrote, “If I should die, think only this of me: / That there’s some corner of a foreign field / That is for ever England.”  

Kipling was trying to whip up hatred by dehumanising Britain’s imperial rival; Brooke romanticised the death that might follow.  

When war was declared crowds cheered in London and Berlin.  Young men across Europe flocked to the recruitment office.  But the joy soon turned to horror.  A year after his idealistic poem was published, Brooke died of septicaemia on a troop ship in the Mediterranean.  In the same year Kipling’s son John was killed in battle. He was 18.  Brooke had been 28.

Kipling wrote another poem soon after, in which a dead soldier tells the reader, "If any question why we died / Tell them, because our fathers lied." What a sad indictment of himself.

War isn’t glorious.  It isn’t fought between saints and monsters, but between human beings.  It matters the stories we tell our children, the messages we give them.  On Wednesday, ISA acknowledged Peace Day.  We asked students to wear white in celebration of peace.  We want them to develop the qualities that will make the world a more peaceful place, not those needed to fight more effective wars.  Our armistice service in the morning acknowledged those who have experienced the horror of war.  Sadly it isn’t just those that fight, but many others besides, including children.

Next week, this nation marks remembrance day proper.  We should never forget; we should also do everything not to repeat.

At the end of the Jungle Book Mowgli goes back to the ‘man village’ because he is safest amongst his own.  But this is just a story from a very long time ago by a man who didn’t see how wrong he had been until his son was killed unnecessarily.  We should celebrate living amid diversity, learning to see the value in other ways of living.