Dr. Grauer's Column - Teachers in a Time of War

Teachers in a Time of War
By Stuart Grauer

(Inspired by an article in Nature journal)

War does not only destroy the “enemy.” It damages the future of everyone involved — including our own children and our own schools.

Today, amidst strife and division at home and war abroad, I cannot imagine that ordinary citizens of Iran — teachers, parents, students, musicians, scientists — are my enemies. Especially their teachers and students. The people I struggle to understand are those on all sides, including my own country’s leaders, who continue ordering the destruction and killing.

That’s one struggle. The other struggle is unspoken — we have to watch a sudden and poorly explained war, to bear witness to quiet and terrible messaging entering our school gateways and student psyches, and to wonder if is all somehow unmentionable. But my charge is to talk about education, not war, though war is at hand, so please press on whatever your politics.

A recent Nature journal report on the bombing of universities and research centers in Iran shows something deeper than geopolitical conflict: the collateral destruction of education itself.

Since the war in Iran began on February 28, 2026, approximately 30 Iranian universities have reportedly been damaged. Among them are Sharif University of Technology — Iran’s leading technological university — and the historic Pasteur Institute of Iran, a research institution more than a century old.[1] The fact is, Iranian scientists and academics have long collaborated with American and international scholars despite governmental hostility between nations. The Nature article mentions an Iranian physicist working with CERN and participating in the Large Hadron Collider CMS collaboration — one of the great, world scientific collaborations.

The ongoing and real damage to younger children’s schools is harder to get data on, maybe because the loss is too intimate or local for statistics gathering. But we already know that classrooms have vanished, teachers and students have been killed, and kids over there are no longer waking up to normal school days—they may never.

(The last time I wrote about this war was during its first week, when a girls’ elementary school was demolished and its students and teachers perished.[2])

It is easy during wartime to reduce war zones to abstractions in a foreign land: “targets,” “infrastructure,” “strategic sites.” But universities are among humanity’s most sacred and defining creations. They are where young people learn to think independently, where scientific discoveries are shared — critically, across borders — where books and ideas survive political eras, and where the next generation imagines a future larger than hatred. They are where trust is built, and that trust can last generations.

When those places are bombed, the damage is never contained inside a school building or even within a single national border.

The Nature article describes Iranian students unable to concentrate because cities around them are under bombardment. Researchers have lost access to the Internet and to international scientific collaboration. Scholars fear not just the physical destruction, but the tightening of political repression after the war ends — the end of their real work and a blunt end to the expression of their moral (and professional) imaginations.

One physicist working with CERN pleaded with journal editors around the world for patience because students and researchers have been struggling simply to function under attack. A research ethicist described scholars unable to focus or safely return to campus. A philosopher returned to his office after a bombing to discover that more than 1,000 books, manuscripts, student papers, and years of handwritten work had vanished in a single night.

Those images matter because education is not only a national asset. It is part of our inheritance and our basis for our connections and trust everywhere.

And there is another layer that teachers must not ignore: wars that normalize attacks on universities and centers of learning end up reshaping our own societies as well. When we grow accustomed to seeing academic life treated as expendable or “collateral,” we accidentally teach our own children something dangerous: that knowledge and the human spirit are secondary to force, politics, and national identity. So, every bomb that destroys a library or classroom abroad diminishes something at home.

While I was growing up, it seemed that World War II had taught us that we could be the good guys.

Yet all our wars since then seem to have carried overtones of greed, ego, nationalism, and self-interest, and the “good guys” have never been easy to agree upon. When my brothers and I were in college, our country was ground deep into a war few of us could fully grasp or subscribe to. Vietnam ground on.

My brother David tells a story from that divisive time. Four student protestors had been murdered by National Guardsmen at Kent State University, protests erupted on campuses everywhere, and classes had been made optional at many universities across the country. But he would never miss a philosophy class.

His professor entered the room silently, spread his papers before him on the podium, and delivered a one-hour lecture before gathering his papers and silently leaving.

It sounds ordinary enough.

But my brother was the only student in attendance.

The hollowness.

Schools are among the few institutions capable of dealing positively with cycles of fear and dehumanization. But what my brother experienced on that strange day was not school, and not the presence of an actual teacher. I still do not know what it was.

Our students absorb the moral atmosphere we create as teachers. Those morals are evident, however much we say nothing. This is why it is imperative for teachers to write about education in a time of war and to keep trying to arrive at some truth.

Our students are comparatively innocent. They sense whether the adults they trust defend learning, curiosity, dissent, scholarship, and culture, or not.

We can try to avoid these conversations out of fear of being “political,” but our students are already “absorbing” war emotionally and socially through their regular media, peers, family stress, etc. Schools influence whether those experiences become isolating and destabilizing — or humanizing. I worry that all this shows up in our sensitive kids in the form of depression or anxiety. There are columns to be written on this topic and the research is a google away.

But it is all blaring out from televisions, podcasts, and phones, anyway. Our students hear it and feel it. One of my students, a junior, calls it “dull hurt.” The erosion may be subtle and overlookable, but it is real and profound. Avoidance is risky. Avoidance is unhealthy.

Avoidance is: not teaching. Not learning. Great teachers have shown us this. One reason Montessori spoke so passionately about peace education was because she witnessed firsthand, during two wars, how societies educated children into obedience, nationalism, and militarism. Great teachers do this. But we teachers don’t even need to speak passionately. As a colleague says, “If we just open up the space for students to share their thoughts, our own judgements don’t even have to come into play... the kids are smart and they are seeing it all, they just need a forum for discussion...open the space.”

At war, we risk raising a generation more cynical about truth, less trusting of schools, and more accustomed to seeing human beings reduced to categories like nations, religions, and tribes rather than communities or human beings. The categories and nationalities can become reductions of people’s worth and spirit.

I do not believe there are people who ought to be our enemies, despite their misguided governments — certainly never students.

The tragedy described in Iran is therefore not simply “their” tragedy or “our” cause. It is a warning to us as educators. The destruction of schools, universities, manuscripts, laboratories, and intellectual communities obviously weakens our global connections.

And here is another word for those global connections:

Civilization.

You can rebuild walls. You can reconstruct laboratories. But rebuilding trust in learning, trust in intellectual freedom, and the peace of mind of students who studied under falling bombs — that may take generations.

Psychologists have shown us something difficult and deep: trauma is intergenerational. When politicians launch wars, children may pass the resulting trauma to their own children, no matter how unnecessary those wars once seemed to them personally.

Personally, today, many teachers I know are having a difficult time imagining what we are receiving in return for the sudden wars unfolding around us — especially compared to what great education might have provided all nations if we invested in that instead. 

If we waged study.

A teacher needs to question. That’s what teachers do. It’s a terrible thing to teach silence (or to confuse morality for politics). American educators must be able to ask during wartime, without prejudice or fear:

What else could these resources have created?

The cost of modern warfare is almost impossible to comprehend. Even limited military operations consume billions of dollars within weeks through missiles, aircraft deployment, intelligence systems, fuel, logistics, reconstruction obligations, environmental destruction, and long-term veteran care. The same resources could fund teachers, preserve small schools, modernize libraries, expand mental health support for students, reduce class sizes, restore arts and environmental programs, forgive student debt, or rebuild aging public campuses across the United States.

I was born in 1950 and have lived through a fair number of wars. Over time, the patterns become visible.

1. Schools and universities become political battlegrounds. From Vietnam to Gaza protests today, campuses become places where young people challenge — and often become disillusioned with — the moral direction of society. Or they grow numb. Things get worse when silence prevails.
2. Fear enters childhood culture. From nuclear drills to lockdown drills, generations of children learn to practice survival inside schools. Many experience an erosion of innocence.
3. Public resources shift. It never fails: massive military dollars coincide with debates over school funding, teacher pay, college costs, arts education, and mental health services.
4. Education becomes one of the last places where societies can still argue about moral meaning. War changes the questions:

• What is patriotism?
• What is truth?
• What is courage?
• What do we owe strangers?
• What kind of civilization are we trying to preserve?

To be honest, sitting here writing, I understand that commenting on the patriotism and ego at play in today’s wars might be sensitive. I’m supposed to be silent and watch this horror. Maybe our country is too fractured to tolerate much reflection.

Will people be angry that teachers like me are even discussing schools being exploded?

For someone born in 1950, the educational story of my lifetime is inseparable from the story of war — not only through destruction abroad, but through the way conflict keeps changing the emotional, civic, intellectual, and moral atmosphere in which our kids grow up.

UNESCO and trauma-informed education researchers repeatedly emphasize that schools create psychological stability partly by helping students make meaning of frightening events rather than avoiding them.[3]

We reveal the values of our nation through what we choose to build — and children need opportunities to talk honestly about those values as they see them. One cultural image this week was a bombed university. Another was a towering, 22-foot high golden statue to the same political celebrity who declared the war. Children are always watching what adults build temples to. All of that is choice, and behind every choice lies a belief system.

Today, as a teacher, I have this to say: the war makers are not my people, and they are not expressing my belief system.

“My people” are not Americans or Iranians or Israelis or Palestinians or Ukrainians alone. They are scholars, surfers, musicians, cooks, gardeners, scientists, librarians, and poets. Everywhere.

And many of them — including nearly all of the teachers I have most admired — share a kind of pacifism: not naïveté about evil, but a clear resistance to greed, cruelty, ego, lying, domination, and the discretionary destruction of human life.

Destroying schools and colleges anywhere — whether labeled war crimes or collateral damage — is like smashing all the violins because you do not like the concert.

I believe that great teachers are, almost by nature, pacifists. Not because they deny conflict or evil, but because they dedicate their lives to the proposition that human domination is not the only possibility. Dr. Goddard (my 12^th grade Problems of American Democracy teacher), Socrates. Paulo Freire. Jesus. Maria Montessori. Thich Nhat Hanh. Krishnamurti. Albert Einstein. Teachers. Seekers of understanding.They were pacifists, but never avoiders.

Recently, our own Secretary of Defense (who calls himself Secretary of War) stated, “The world is not governed by goodwill. It is governed by force.”

That may describe some of history. But it stands in direct opposition to the faith of education I spent the past 50 years in pursuing: that human beings grow through relationship, inquiry, imagination, and understanding rather than domination. That we humans are up to that.

Even the classic The Art of War by Sun Tzu was not merely about winning battles. At its heart is the idea that the highest form of victory preserves life, culture, and continuity. It is victory achieved without destruction.

My teacher-heroes stand on the opposite side of history from those who normalize and rationalize force—and they make that stand known. The educator’s instinct is regenerative: to repair, awaken, cultivate, and mentor possibility. Education is the oldest pacifist tradition I can find in the history books. Are we teaching this today?

Schools and universities are among the earliest human creations explicitly meant not only to connect us across borders, but to outlive us. When war destroys them, everyone loses, especially the coming generations.

When people begin believing that war is inevitable or redemptive, those generations inherit less education — and with that, less empathy, less historical understanding, and less capacity for peace (inner and outer).

Education is what happens when we pass along civilization. We can wage study.

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[1] Heartbreaking’: Iranian scientists on losing labs, libraries and liberty, Nature, May 4, 2026.

[2] The Boundaries of Peace Education: A Girl’s School is Bombed, Stuart Grauer, March 4, 2026.

[3] Resilience in a time of war: Tips for parents and teachers of teens, American Psychological Association, October 16, 2023.

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