My 5-year old son came home from school last Monday in tears, scared that he may never see his dad again. What could have made him this distraught at pre-school you may wonder? Surely it must be one of the children in the playground?
Nope, it was a teacher, who showed them a photograph of WW2 soldiers boarding a train with tearful wives and children waving them goodbye. She then proceeded to tell them that some of the children never saw their daddies again as they were killed in war.
No matter how cruel the realities of this world, my young son does not have to have his childhood destroyed by them. There is plenty of time for him to learn that bad things happen, and school has no right to force those realities on him for the sake of celebrating and glorifying a day in history that Greece said 'no' to Italy in 1940.
It took a lot of convincing for my son to believe that we live in different times and daddy is not a soldier who will be called to war. I had to liken this history lesson to that of knights and Vikings to make him feel that some parts of the past are almost mythical, after all, I told him, you don't see knights with swords riding around on horses nowadays.
I was absolutely livid. This is not the first time he has come home with strong political or religious indoctrination and it appears it is not limited to his school; it is the general way of state schools on the island. You may recall my column last Easter (before my son was in pre-school) where I wrote of a friend's children being traumatised by their junior school showing the crucifixion of Christ in full, gory detail in a Larnaca village school – something they routinely do every Easter.
I want my children to attend Greek school – at least for the primary years – as we live here and I want them to be able to use both English and Greek equally well, for they may end up choosing to stay here in the future. My Greek certainly isn't good enough to work somewhere where Greek writing and typing is required, and I don't want them to have doors closed to them due to a language barrier like I have. I fully intend them to learn English alongside their Greek schooling too, but I was so tempted to pull him out of the Greek system then and there and never look back.
Both my children were baptised Greek Orthodox, but I want to raise them the way I want to raise them when it comes to religion and politics. Whilst it is all very well learning the history and religion of the island, there seems to be a very biased element to a lot of it, and it is way too meaty and heavy for children of their age.
For one, how can we expect the next generation to be ambassadors of change and peace on our divided island when they come home hating 'the Turks', without really knowing what a 'Turk' is other than being 'a bad man who stole my country'. Of course what they did to our island is abominable, but fostering a climate of hate in children who should not know that hate exists is really damaging.
And as for politics, it is certainly very Greece-centric, but that there is a whole other story, and one I am not touching with a barge pole!
First appeared in The Cyprus Weekly, 31/10/14
