Remembering Hiroshima & Nagasaki: Education and the ‘Greatest Danger’
Zulfi Ali
On the 81st anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, this blog reflects on the aims of education in a fragile world.
The teacher and deep ecologist Joanna Macey starts her essay ‘The Greatest Danger’ with a simple yet beguiling question: “How do we live with the fact that we are destroying our world?”
On the 81st anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bombs by USA on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I want to extend Macey’s question to reflect on the role of education in a world gripped by multiple existential crises by asking: “How do we educate at a time when we are destroying the planet?”
On the journey from what David Korten called the ‘great unravelling’, towards the ‘great turning’, the greatest danger, argued Macey, is not the many deep crises we face as humanity. It is apathy and the quality of our responses to the crises. For her, “of all the dangers we face, from climate chaos to nuclear war, none is so great as the deadening of our response.” As a believer in the power of education for the greater good, I want to reflect on this provocation and what it might mean for framing education in contemporary global settings.
To put things in perspective as we mark this dark anniversary, let us start with some reminders. By the end of 1945 the two atomic bombs had killed over 200,000 people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, about 38,000 of them children. As ground temperatures reached 4,000º C and radioactive rain poured down, the two cities were largely flattened. The survivors of the bombings, the Hibakusha, suffered long-term with leukaemia and other cancers. Their lives remind us that each person killed, injured or otherwise impacted by the bombs had a name, a family, and a life. Each person represented all of humanity.
Now imagine nuclear war today. By current standards the atomic bombs dropped on those two cities were ‘low yield’, and the thermonuclear weapons we have today are many times more powerful. Between them, the 9 nuclear-power countries (none of whose leaders can be trusted to not use the bombs) have over 12,000 nuclear warheads. The use of nuclear weapons is no longer a distant possibility. It has become a high probability. On any given day we have the capability, and increasingly the potential, to end civilisation in the few hours between breakfast and lunch.
In 2025 global military spending stood at a staggering $2.9 trillion. At the same time world leaders insisted that there wasn’t enough money for universal education and healthcare or for ending global hunger and poverty. Add the many other crises we face – environmental, social justice, political, to name just three – and we can understand why the Doomsday Clock, operated by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, is just 85 seconds away from midnight, the closest it has ever been.
And so, we return to the question of what education can do, and what it looks like against this backdrop. Education does not take place in a vacuum, and four decades of the political economy of neoliberalism has hollowed out the sector. Barring some exceptions, education is now largely transactional, standardised, sanitised, and employability driven. It is no longer a public good, but a private investment towards human capital development. The collapse of the humanities and arts has eroded the holistic nature of learning. In the face of stark financial bottom lines, we are managers, administrators and accountants before we are educationalists.
There has been an elite capture by the billionaire class who are promising us idyllic AI fuelled futures whilst buying properties in remote locations and constructing underground bunkers to survive an apocalypse. Do
they know something we don’t? They are driving us into a tech metaverse where nature and humans have no intrinsic value. Some call this ‘techno-feudalism’, others ‘techno-fascism’.
Those of us who dream of education to be bolder, more humane and connected to the challenges we face, must think harder and more creatively. We need to dig deep to replace the narrow and predictable world of data structures, algorithms and AI with more meaningful education. One that is risky and expansive; that diverges instead of converges; that invites learners to awe and wonder; that emphasises human flourishing in harmony with nature; and that encourages and inspires us to dream of a better world.
I don’t think this can happen within formal institutional structures. Schools, universities and other formal educational channels have been largely bought, co-opted, compromised, and neutralised. They are too influenced by the market economy of league tables, standardised test scores, and intense competition to do the job required. Formal education is also complicit in actively othering communities, dehumanising people and siding with power. The billionaire-controlled media is also not a viable option. We cannot beat them at their own game.
The development of meaningful education therefore requires us to create people’s movements. Human-to-human, face-to-face. We need to focus on informal and non-formal spaces, which means we need to go back to our communities and start rebuilding all the structures that have been starved and undermined: community-based organizations and groups; art centres; trade unions; student unions; faith groups; and organic spaces to learn.
If we are searching for inspiration, I think the preamble to the Earth Charter provides an excellent starting point for addressing the educational challenges that lie ahead: “We stand at a critical moment in Earth’s history, a time when humanity must choose its future… To move forward we must recognize that … we are one human family and one Earth community with a common destiny. We must join together… it is imperative that we, the peoples of Earth, declare our responsibility to one another, to the greater community of life, and to future generations.”
Are we, students and teachers, ready to take on this responsibility to organically build a people’s movement based on solidarity and hope?
Zulfi Ali