If Kids Can Kill

Recently Nicolas Sarkozy revised the school curriculum in France. Specifically, he is mandating that fifth graders learn the life story of a French child who was killed in the holocaust. This has been met with massive outcry with people claiming that kids are too young to learn about such horror.

This seems ludicrous to me. There are places in the world where children are being trained as soldiers. There are places in the world where children are seeing violence on their streets daily. There are places in the world where genocide is occurring today. How can we stop it if we fail to tell our children about the horror which has happened in this world? Isn't educating children the best way to prevent such horror from happening again?

This is something I've struggled with. I was wearing a 'Stop Genocide in Sudan' shirt one day and a little girl asked me/her mother what genocide was. Her mom said she was too young to know and gave me the evil eye. What do you think? Is there an age in which you can be too young to learn about the horrors of the world? Is it not a weakness on the left that we overprotect children (there are a lot of evangelical kids and neo-Nazi children doing terrible things). What do you think?