HE had the eyes of an adult and his own intense thousand-yard stare. I still recall that uneasy day when I first met 10-year-old Jacuba in the rehabilitation centre outside Freetown in Sierra Leone.

“Since we got him back he fights all the time with everyone, nothing frightens him, and sometimes I wonder if he is still my son,” his mother told me tearfully.

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Getting to his feet, little Jacuba showed me the drill he had been made to perform twice daily with other boys after being kidnapped and spending over a year with rebel fighters as a child soldier in the West African bush.

Stick thin and marching stiffly across the room, he performed a perfect about-turn before slapping his tiny sandalled foot on the clay floor and saluting.

Nothing about it resembled a game. It was the traumatised actions of a little boy indoctrinated through fear and violence.

A child so forcibly dehumanised he had thought nothing of killing men, women and children, before cutting out their hearts or livers and eating them.

Jacuba’s picture was just one of many I came across the other day while searching my photo archive.

In those archive files are countless other photographs of youngsters whose stories in my years as a foreign correspondent I’ve listened to and told.

Each and every one of them is part of a generation whose lives have been lost to war and disaster.

Lives like that of 13-year-old Amir, his grubby face peering out from another photograph and wearing his filthy black sweatshirt with “Hoochie Coochie Baby” emblazoned on the front.

Amir was a good-natured Afghan boy who served me tea from a plastic Thermos while never letting go of his Kalashnikov assault rifle.

When asked about his sweater, Amir’s face always lit up.

He said he knew nothing of the places – Hollywood, Paris, Rome – whose names adorned its motif. Only that his father brought it back for him from neighbouring Pakistan, before he was killed by a shell explosion.

Since then Amir had been a holy warrior, a “mujahed”, he told me, who supported his mother and two sisters by fighting in the streets of the then devastated Afghan capital, Kabul, back in the mid 1990s.

And then more recently there is a haunting picture of 11-year-old Sasha, who with her mother and older sister had fled their village in Eastern Ukraine’s Luhansk Oblast (province).

Ever since men with guns came to her village, Sasha lives in fear and shows all the characteristic signs of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

In a week here in Scotland when the rights and wrongs of national education assessments for five-year-olds saw political point scoring and wrangling, all these pictures reminded me of the need to keep things in perspective.

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Everyone wants the best for their kids, and it’s only right that proper political debate, and discussion, helps achieve and shape an educational strategy that above all else has children’s interests at its heart.

Disappointing and unedifying it was then to see some politicians and others in the wake of the vote talk merely in recriminatory terms, as if taking political scalps and delivering future payback were all that mattered.

Children’s lives at every level need adult guidance and support, but so often in today’s wider world, voiceless and vulnerable they are reduced to little more than political pawns and collateral for cynical “adult” agendas and ambitions.

At its most extreme across the globe, war and the “grown ups” who perpetrate it have turned children into human minesweepers, spies, sex slaves, suicide bombers, torturers, rapists, killers and, above all, victims.

The National:

It says much that as some Scottish politicians bickered in the wake of Wednesday’s P1 vote, that very same day, humanitarian agencies were warning that five million children were at risk from famine in war-torn Yemen. An entire generation the agencies said may face death and starvation on an unprecedented scale.

Just as so many children’s lives have been sacrificed to the evil of war so too has the right to an education.

Remember those UN millennium development goals promising that all children would have access to primary education by 2015? Well, that deadline has long since passed and tens of millions are still out of school.

Perhaps it’s hardly surprising. If many in the world fail to see famine as an emergency then it’s most unlikely they will ever see the need for education as one.

Back in 2014 as the deadline for delivery of the promised millennium development goals on primary education loomed, I recall reading some startling facts.

One was that Nigeria, while having more out-of-school children than any other country, also had one of the fastest growing markets for luxury private jets.

These were the must-have items for the country’s oil tycoons, billionaire businessmen and other rich elite.

For so many children caught in such iniquitous conditions, poverty and conflict zones, the slow, insidious corrosion of illiteracy, ignorance and exclusion persists decade after decade.

Education is as much a priority of any international basic humanitarian response as water, food and shelter.

Time and again while overseas covering conflict or humanitarian crises I have heard parents cite education as one of their top priorities, even though hunger and danger stalks. These same parents know too that education gives children the building blocks to rebuild their lives and, eventually, their country.

Right now according to Save the Children one in six children live in places wracked by war and those 357 million young people live at risk of grave violations.

Far from the situation improving over the passing years since I met the likes of Jacuba, Amir and Sasha, the number of youngsters living in the line of fire has increased by more than 75% from the early 1990s.

Wars divide and scatter people.

They dislocate communities and families, children especially.

It was Eglantyne Jebb, the social reformer and founder of the Save the Children organisation, who once best distilled the nature of that experience to what it really means.

“All wars, whether just or unjust, disastrous or victorious, are waged against the child,” she said.

As adults, we can never remind ourselves of that enough.