Robert Harris is a passionate and active advocate for eduction worldwide, having founded Education International in 1993. His recently published Dancing Before Storms: Five revolutions that shaped today’s world is now being considered for addition to the International Baccalaureate (IB) curriculum.

In this guest post, Robert discusses the importance of teaching young people history and setting them up with the tools to recognise the hallmarks of past mistakes.

Read on below.

On October 22, 1962, I came home from school to find my parents listening on the radio to a speech by US President John F Kennedy. I was 16, preparing for my final secondary leaving exams, aiming for a scholarship to university.

Kennedy’s speech about Soviet nuclear capable missiles in Cuba and his decision to block further deliveries with a naval quarantine in the Caribbean was sobering and even scary, for it sounded as it the world might be on the brink of nuclear war. The next day, one of my school mates said his dad, who was on the naval reserve, had been called up. This was for real. The experience marked me as I prepared for adulthood. 

The Cuban missile crisis, as it became known, was resolved. The world edged back from the brink of nuclear Armageddon. Over the last 70 years we have become accustomed to the idea that nuclear exchanges would be madness.

The acronym for the doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction – MAD – was ironically reassuring, because it assumed that the irrational was unthinkable.

Today I talked over coffee in Geneva with the Director General of the International Baccalaureate, Olli-Pekka Heinonen, about the hopes and fears of today’s young generation. Olli-Pekka was Minister of Education of Finland during the period of great reform in the late 1990s which led to his country’s reputation as an educational leader. Olli-Pekka said he had spent the recent summer reviewing studies about what young people expect in the years to come. The overall impression, he said, was not reassuring – many concerns about the impact of climate change, but also general uncertainty about the direction of our societies. Starkly, many young people are not sure there is a future.

As I drove back around the lake I listened to the latest news on Ukraine. Former Russian President and Prime Minister Dimitri Medvedev, Vladimir Putin’s long-time ally, had explicitly raised the spectre of a nuclear strike. MAD was no longer unthinkable.

Olli-Pekka and I had discussed a few hours earlier that once revolutions and wars are set in motion the outcomes are simply unpredictable. This is one of the key lessons from the history of Dancing Before Storms.  

Today’s young generation is right to be worried – very worried – about what the future holds for them. The big question is: what can young people do about it? The last chapter of my book poses this question without pretending to provide a definitive answer. But apathy and resignation to fate can hardly be a solution.    

Young people must be encouraged to think critically and reflect globally. This is the essence of the International Baccalaureate. I would like to think that my book about the history of five revolutions and the links between them will help them to do just that.