Letter from Lea Dasberg

Lea Dasberg
Jerusalem, Israel

Citation: Dasberg, Lea. “Letter from Lea Dasberg.” Children, Youth and Environments 13(2), 2003. Retrieved [date] from http://colorado.edu/journals/cye.

August 14, 2003

Dear Dr. van Vliet-,

After some midnight failures, I finally got your fax the next day on a more convenient time! Globalization or not, sun and moon do not agree to change their march through time. But never mind, I felt honored by your request and thank you to explain that so thoroughly and clearly, instead of just to send a businesslike note. That's the reason that I also answer in a real letter as a human to a fellow human and not as a computer keyboard to a computer screen. Besides that, I felt in your letter a soul mate with regard to the injustice in our world in general and towards children in particular. After having said all this you will be disappointed by my not fulfilling your wish to receive an article from me for CYE.

The practical reason for this negative reaction is that I for many years already have turned to other fields of research, changing the subjects of children's rights, multicultural education, and peace education in a pedagogical historical perspective, for research of childhoods according to autobiographies and in particular Jewish ones. Work that I did in the former fields is now extremely dated, which is usually the case with social sciences. That's one of the reasons that I turned back to my original profession, the one of an historian, perhaps out of the desire to try, toward the last quarter of my life, to produce once more a work of longer duration to which the humanities generally provide more possibility than the social sciences.

This choice, however, results in certain problems for my conscience. There is, for example, the question whether social research isn't more useful to help change the injustice in our world. I must confess that I got quite disappointed about that direct usefulness. I came to the conclusion that, where the injustice does not originate by a lack of knowledge, it will not disappear by adding knowledge. It's not like fighting physical diseases, which most times do originate by lack of knowledge, through adding medical knowledge. Injustice is a moral problem that has to be solved in two ways: education (not educational science, but educating and teaching children directly) and politics. As a pensionarian I have my educating task, behind me, first with high school students and then with university students, and in politics I have no other task than every civilian with the right to vote. Once I thought and expected that academics in education departments of universities could influence politicians, but that didn't happen. First because academicians in our cultural western system are so career-directed and are forced to be so by the profit hunters of the economy gospel and capitalism; and secondly, because those who really want to do something about the injustice, are by their own capitalist education limited in their understanding of “injustice” as something only connected to material means that are inaccessible to the majority of the world's population. Of course this inaccessibility is an important part of the injustice, but it is a lack of philosophical vision to limit the problem to material needs only.

Until now “globalization,” in daily practice, has not meant that the blessed countries make an effort to spread welfare and well being over greater stretches of the Earth, even not, as your letter suggests, with concern to medical care, (as newspapers are reporting that western pharmaceutical firms are selling medicines to the Third World that had been taken off the market in the West because of discovered dangerous shortcomings). Until now, “globalization” rather leads to the uprooting of millions of people from the Third World. Contrary to what they hoped, to win a place among the blessed ones, they became second, if not sixth class residents. Once poor but among equals, they degrade quickly to poor and unequal. Slavery reborn, so far as material means are concerned. But there is also their being uprooted from their ancestral culture, culturally and religiously homeless. Non-material curses, but curses, damnation. As educators we shouldn't forget that this also concerns the thousands of adopted children, well fed and clad now, but uprooted.

These horrible situations are absolutely unnecessary. We have the technological and scientific tools to repair them. But cowardly hiding behind the “noble” respect for other nations' autonomy and sovereignty, the United Nations maintain the principle of “non-interference.” Why, for example, not enlist the best water works engineers of Holland to go to the Philippines and build there the necessary dams against the annual floods that destroy harvest after harvest of rice, and to build them with “global” money! The Philippine people are well-educated, they have good schools and are eager to study and diligent, but as long as they don't get that one push out of the cycle of annual disaster, Philippine children have to grow up without their mothers, sometimes without both parents who work as slaves for them in the blessed countries, creating irreparable alienation in families from generation to generation. Only politics can do something. Articles about integration in multicultural societies do only help the careers of academicians, not these children.

This is a letter, not an article. There is not one single footnote. But I had to write it.

-Lea Dasberg

Lea Dasberg was born in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in 1930. She received a master's degree and Ph.D. in history from the University of Amsterdam. She taught history to high school students, as well as history and philosophy of education at the University of Utrecht, and held a professorial appointment at the University of Amsterdam from 1980 to 1993. Since 1984 she has lived Israel, writing, researching and also participating in an educational program in the Negev Desert. She has written books and articles on various topics including the history of children, children's literature, peace education, utopia and education, and the roles of teachers.