A few years ago, at Newton North’s commencement, I ran into a former student who’d come to see a younger sibling walk across the stage. My former student, from Nonantum, had grown quite a bit since his own graduation. When I asked how he’d been, he told me he had just come back from a second tour of duty in Iraq with the U.S. Army. 

It was an unusual encounter. The current war with Iran has shown me again how far away the violence and destruction can seem to many of the kids at school. While some have gone on to serve and fight, and others have seen parents and siblings deploy, most are rarely that close to our nation’s wars. That makes it hard to make them understand or even pay attention.

It’s hard to know what students grasp about Iran. They don’t talk much about it. Our social studies teachers have made sure they can find the Strait of Hormuz on a map. In the week following that first Saturday when bombs began again to drop in the Middle East, one student did ask, “Is there something going on with Iran?” Like much of America, more personal concerns may have been at the top of that kid’s mind. 

I suppose we teachers get by on an old faith. We teach them to read and to calculate, to understand the natural world and to put past ages in context, with the hope that they become engaged citizens. We want to believe their education is sound enough to inspire them to ask questions when their leaders decide to take their nation to war. 

Some do engage in political issues. There were kids who went to a No Kings rally on Boston Common, where a Milford High School student who’d been seized by ICE told the crowd, “Freedom means we question power. We don’t worship it.” I know young people enjoy the feeling of being in a crowd, being part of something bigger than themselves. Appeals to their idealism are an apt place to start.

Some students have voiced strong feelings about ICE’s aggressive or illegal enforcement of immigration laws, even if they aren’t always aware of the real lives of migrant classmates. About 200 students walked out of school to protest ICE a few weeks ago. As a teacher, I have affection for their desire for the dramatic gesture. 

Students were struck by the immediacy of the violence in shaky videos they saw coming out of Minneapolis earlier this year where two Americans were killed protesting ICE’s crackdown. When Israel suffered its terrible loss in 2023 and its bombs fell in Gaza, many students appeared to feel it personally. 

Some have sought to emulate the protesting college students they saw on their screens. Of course, there are students with family now in the Middle East, or in hiding from ICE, or in Ukraine as well. There are students who have suffered themselves under governments that rule by fear or know in some other way the cruelty of power.  

For most, though, it’s difficult to break through the backdrop of continuous war. New video of smoke rising above rubble in Iran seems to provoke them less than last year’s horrors. Meanwhile, leaders refusing to even say the word ‘war,’ and purposely portraying carnage as a video game, strive deliberately to make it all unreal.

This ambient destruction presents a double moral injury.  While so many flashing images inure us to faraway suffering, we grow to accept violence and devastation as feasible national strategy. 

For my own children, the oldest born just a month after the 9/11 attacks, war persists as bad winter weather. Iran, of course, has been a threatening presence since I was in middle school. I suppose that dates me. 

When I was a senior, my history teacher invited a guest speaker to our classroom. Don Cooke graduated from my high school, grew up in the same Cleveland suburb I did, and was one of the 52 hostages held for 444 days at the U.S. embassy in Tehran from 1979 to 1981. He had been on his first Foreign Service posting when he was taken hostage and had been sitting where I was less than 10 years earlier. He told the kind of stories that appealed to us, mentioning abuses suffered, plans for escape, and tricks played on his captors.

His appearance at the front of the room made my classmates and me feel more a part of world events. His talk made them seem not so far away. I am in want of something so visceral to offer in my classroom. 

The admirable service of my former Newton North student remains a rarity with our all-volunteer force. Few of my students will ever stand as close as he has to battle. I know I will need to do more to make them know about this current conflict, to make them understand the suffering caused by a war of choice fought in their country’s name.

Tom Fabian is an English teacher at Newton North High School and faculty advisor to its student newspaper, the Newtonite. He can be reached at tfabianteaching@gmail.com.