Childhood and Growing Up Theme Analysis

In interviews, Orson Scott Card has argued that adults simply don’t understand children. There was never a point in his life, he’s said, during which he felt like a “child”—in other words, he never thought in the simplistic, sentimental ways that children supposedly think. It’s no surprise that the author of Ender’s Game feels this way—there’s not a single child in the novel who thinks in the “simplistic terms” Card derides. Indeed, it takes us a few pages before we realize that the protagonist, Ender Wiggin, is only six years old—based on the way his mind works, he could be sixteen, or even thirty-six.

And yet in spite of Card’s objections to the sentimentalized ways children are usually portrayed in literature, it’s important to think about the role of childhood in his novel. Children aren’t just tiny adults: to begin with, their youth allows them to be educated and trained for purposes that aren’t their own. This is the point of the Battle School: rather than enlisting seasoned soldiers, the IF enrolls young children in their program. If the IF begins its training programs early enough, then its children will grow into (or be manipulated into) soldiers whose abilities far exceed those of soldiers in previous human wars. With this in mind, the IF forces children to spend their entire waking lives studying and participating in battle.

Paradoxically, even though the IF’s children are trained to enjoy the competition of fighting, the children’s other great advantage over adult soldiers is that they’ve never been in an actual war. Using games, simulations, and propaganda, the IF teaches Ender and his peers to enjoy war, without ever exposing them to mass death, injury, or panic—in other words, the things that make experienced soldiers despise war. The result is an army of brilliant, highly-trained, war-loving soldiers who are nevertheless ignorant—and innocent—of war. At the end of the novel—after Ender destroys the Buggers—Mazer Rackham explains to Ender why this combination of innocence and experience is so lethal. Only a young child, ignorant of the traumas of a battle, could defeat the Buggers, because only a young child could muster the creativity and energy necessary to win such a battle. Childhood, at least according to Orson Scott Card, isn’t so much a state of mind as it is an absence of adult experiences. The IF, recognizing children’s potential for combat, seeks to give them the right experiences for winning a war.

But if Card defines childhood as the absence of adulthood, what does it mean to become an adult? The adults in Ender’s Game who have been tasked with Ender’s education at Battle School are largely indifferent to whether or not Ender grows into a mature, well-adjusted man. Even if they express some guilt over their actions, their overriding goal is always to push Ender into becoming a commander capable of destroying the Buggers. In the interest of doing so, they wage psychological war on Ender, distancing him from his friends and throwing him into dangerous situations.

In the end, Ender grows up, but not because of Battle School or his teachers. Instead, he becomes an adult by atoning for his destruction of the Bugger species. In order to do so, Ender must recognize that he has committed a horrible crime by killing the Buggers. He must then accept that he, more than anyone else, is qualified to understand the Buggers, and finally, he must search for a new home for the Buggers. This takes time and effort, and is just as challenging for Ender as his time in Battle School was. As the final sentence of Ender’s Game (“He looked a long time”) suggests, coming of age isn’t a matter of learning a lesson: on the contrary, to grow up, a child needs to self-reflect, accept that he’s capable of evil, and then try to do good.