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Thursday, June 03, 2004
Joanne Jacobs links to this article about how most schools teach World War II these days. The emphasis is on social history rather than military history.Among 76 teenagers interviewed near their high schools this week in Maryland, Virginia and the District, recognition of the internment camps, a standard part of every area history curriculum, was high -- two-thirds gave the right answer when asked what happened to Japanese Americans during the war. But only one-third could name even one World War II general, and about half could name a World War II battle.
Diane Ravitch, an educational historian at New York University, said the big emphasis in high schools today is on the internment camps, as well as women in the workforce on the home front and discrimination against African Americans at home and in the armed services.
"Then, too, there was a war in the Atlantic and Pacific," she said.
Teachers and historians have been arguing for decades about how to teach World War II and other parts of American history. Many surveys, and interviews with students and teachers, indicate that there is less emphasis now on battles and victories, sparked in part by American failure in the Vietnam War, which had a significant impact on this generation of scholars and teachers.
As an American history teacher who has taught at the middle school level and now teaches honors high school American history as well as Advanced Placement history, I can testify to the emphasis on social history in the curriculum. The textbooks will usually have a brief summary of the military progress of the war. But there are several obligatory sections for every war: how the war impacted women, blacks, and other minorities. For World War II, the section on Japanese internment is always a major curriculum point. The military history is a minor point in comparison. When I taught in middle school, I didn't have to worry about a state test and was able to spend 3 or 4 weeks on World War II. I put a lot of emphasis on the 1930s because I wanted the kids to understand how the international community backed down time after time when the chances of stopping Hitler or Japan would have been a lot easier than in 1939. Even Hitler was amazed that the French and British allowed him to move into the Rhineland with no opposition. I also spent a lot of time on the military history. Kids love studying that, both the boys and girls. It's like a movie to them but it is real. Of course, we covered the social history, but, for most kids that is the least interesting part. Women working in factories just doesn't measure up with the fatal five minutes at Midway in piquing an 8th grader's interest.
Now I teach in high school. I have much more time pressure and concern about teaching the curriculum since my kids have to take a standardized test. For my Advanced Placement kids, we do almost zilch on military history for any war we study. That is not part of the AP curriculum. They need to know what leads up to a war and what resulted from it as well as the major turning point battles. For example, for the Revolution, they need to know Lexington and Concord, Saratoga, and Yorktown and zip, they're done. Never mind that Trenton or Cowpens are riveting stories. We just don't have time for that. For World War II, they probably need to know Pearl Harbor, Midway, and D-Day, and that's about it. But the social history....that's another story. They better know how every single war impacted women and families, blacks and other minorities, civil rights, the economy, the role of the federal government, and politics. Every single AP test will probably have a social history question. And, as I tell my kids, when you see "social" on an AP test, think women and blacks, and you'll be able to come up with a good answer. And for World War II, throw in Japanese internment and the Zoot Suit riots, and you're doing great. But for military history, they'll need to take my elective on the Revolution and the Civil War to get some real military history other than a brief skimming of the surface.
12 comments
Joanne Jacobs links to this article about how most schools teach World War II these days. The emphasis is on social history rather than military history.
Among 76 teenagers interviewed near their high schools this week in Maryland, Virginia and the District, recognition of the internment camps, a standard part of every area history curriculum, was high -- two-thirds gave the right answer when asked what happened to Japanese Americans during the war. But only one-third could name even one World War II general, and about half could name a World War II battle.
Diane Ravitch, an educational historian at New York University, said the big emphasis in high schools today is on the internment camps, as well as women in the workforce on the home front and discrimination against African Americans at home and in the armed services.
"Then, too, there was a war in the Atlantic and Pacific," she said.
Teachers and historians have been arguing for decades about how to teach World War II and other parts of American history. Many surveys, and interviews with students and teachers, indicate that there is less emphasis now on battles and victories, sparked in part by American failure in the Vietnam War, which had a significant impact on this generation of scholars and teachers.
As an American history teacher who has taught at the middle school level and now teaches honors high school American history as well as Advanced Placement history, I can testify to the emphasis on social history in the curriculum. The textbooks will usually have a brief summary of the military progress of the war. But there are several obligatory sections for every war: how the war impacted women, blacks, and other minorities. For World War II, the section on Japanese internment is always a major curriculum point. The military history is a minor point in comparison. When I taught in middle school, I didn't have to worry about a state test and was able to spend 3 or 4 weeks on World War II. I put a lot of emphasis on the 1930s because I wanted the kids to understand how the international community backed down time after time when the chances of stopping Hitler or Japan would have been a lot easier than in 1939. Even Hitler was amazed that the French and British allowed him to move into the Rhineland with no opposition. I also spent a lot of time on the military history. Kids love studying that, both the boys and girls. It's like a movie to them but it is real. Of course, we covered the social history, but, for most kids that is the least interesting part. Women working in factories just doesn't measure up with the fatal five minutes at Midway in piquing an 8th grader's interest.
Now I teach in high school. I have much more time pressure and concern about teaching the curriculum since my kids have to take a standardized test. For my Advanced Placement kids, we do almost zilch on military history for any war we study. That is not part of the AP curriculum. They need to know what leads up to a war and what resulted from it as well as the major turning point battles. For example, for the Revolution, they need to know Lexington and Concord, Saratoga, and Yorktown and zip, they're done. Never mind that Trenton or Cowpens are riveting stories. We just don't have time for that. For World War II, they probably need to know Pearl Harbor, Midway, and D-Day, and that's about it. But the social history....that's another story. They better know how every single war impacted women and families, blacks and other minorities, civil rights, the economy, the role of the federal government, and politics. Every single AP test will probably have a social history question. And, as I tell my kids, when you see "social" on an AP test, think women and blacks, and you'll be able to come up with a good answer. And for World War II, throw in Japanese internment and the Zoot Suit riots, and you're doing great. But for military history, they'll need to take my elective on the Revolution and the Civil War to get some real military history other than a brief skimming of the surface.
My APUSH WWII unit this year seemed to spend as much time on Japanese internment and Rosie the Riveter as on the Holocaust and the greater issues of the war. There was a dearth of information about the war itself -- we covered events leading to the war in a fair amount of detail, and then skipped most of the important events of the next four years. Minorities and women have their place in history, but that place is necessarily subservient to the general human experience and the events that have led to our current position.
My son is in high school and luckily he had a history teacher this past semester who actually taught history. In junior high school though he had a teacher who told the class the Great Depression was during the 50s! Some of the students had to correct her.
: 9:38 PM
If we cared about that war, the men who won it and the ideas it suggests, we would teach our children (at least) four topics:
• The major battles of the war. When I was a child in the 1960s, names like Corregidor and Iwo Jima were still sacred, and pronounced everywhere with respect. Writing in the 1960s about the battle of Midway, Samuel Eliot Morison stepped out of character to plead with his readers: "Threescore young aviators . . . met flaming death that day in reversing the verdict of battle. Think of them, reader, every Fourth of June. They and their comrades who survived changed the whole course of the Pacific War." Today the Battle of Midway has become niche-market nostalgia material, and most children (and many adults) have never heard of it. Thus we honor "the greatest generation." ...
• The bestiality of the Japanese. The Japanese army saw captive soldiers as cowards, lower than lice. If we forget this we dishonor the thousands who were tortured and murdered, and put ourselves in danger of believing the soul-corroding lie that all cultures are equally bad or good. Some Americans nowadays seem to think America's behavior during the war was worse than Japan's--we did intern many loyal Americans of Japanese descent. That was unforgivable--and unspeakably trivial compared to Japan's unique achievement, mass murder one atrocity at a time....
• The attitude of American intellectuals. Before Pearl Harbor but long after the character of Hitlerism was clear--after the Nuremberg laws, the Kristallnacht pogrom, the establishment of Dachau and the Gestapo--American intellectuals tended to be dead set against the U.S. joining Britain's war on Hitler....
Why rake up these Profiles in Disgrace? Because in the Iraq War era they have a painfully familiar ring.
• The veterans' neglected voice. World War II produced an extraordinary literature of first-person soldier narratives--most of them out of print or unknown. Books like George MacDonald Fraser's "Quartered Safe Out Here," Philip Ardery's "Bomber Pilot," James Fahey's "Pacific War Diary." If we were serious about commemorating the war, we would do something serious. The Library of America includes two volumes on "Reporting World War II," but where are the soldiers' memoirs versus the reporters'? If we were serious, we would have every grade school in the nation introduce itself to local veterans and invite them over. We'd use software to record these informal talks and weave them into a National Second World War Narrative in cyberspace. That would be a monument worth having.
: 7:27 PM
I especially second David Gelernter's second comment about the "bestiality" of the Japanese. I would go farther though, and discuss the racism that was central to their goal of establishing what they called a "greater Asian co-prosperity sphere."
There is poor instruction and comprehension of WW2 out there. I had a discussion with a high-school student who was convinced that the U.S. 'asked' for Pear Harbor. When I asked him why that was, he said that it was because we refused to sell strategic materials to Japan. His argument was that we had no right to do that, and that Japan attacked us in self-defense. That got my hackles up. After a while (and a remarkable job of not having an aneurism), I was able to explain that since we were committed to staying out of the war, our embargo against Japan was the most peaceful way we could pursue, while denying Japan further tools to kill Chinese civilians. You see: his teacher had neglected to tell his class that back around the early thirties, Japan began to rack up a body count in the Far East that would eventually reach into the millions. Nobody bothers to talk about this. There was no 'Date-rape of Nanking' - it was a bloody massacre. Pearl Harbor was the highly visible act that forced our nation into the war: but hardly anyone also remembers that at the same time, the Japanese moved against out bases in the Phillipines and Wake Island. What I truly abhor is the fact that our use of the atomic bombs is absolutely demonized - yet if you look at the effects of those bombings versus the fire raids on Tokyo, the death toll is much less. Add that to the comparison to the Chinese civilian death toll inflicted by Japan, the number becomes even smaller. But you see, we are the bad guys because we won.
This trend of 'mea culpa' extends even further: when discussing the European war, little is mentioned of the Holocaust. And the Germans' murderous streak ends with the number of six million Jews. There is a convenient omission of another several million Gypsies, homosexuals, political prisoners, mentally handicapped, and Polish and Soviet P.O.W.s. Nor is there mention of Russian and Ukrainian civilians who were gassed or shot to create Hitler's ideal of 'Lebensraum' for the new Aryan nobility.
I understand that this is a result of 'Post-VietNam-ism, and that the professors, school administrators, and others who remember that war. So do I. I was around then. But it seems that so much of the teaching now centers on the things we did wrong instead of right. And that is an abomination. When our media makes a big deal over 700 soldiers dying in Iraq (a tragic loss that I in no way intend to minimize), they fail to mention that that was less than 1/3 of our casualties in one day during the Normandy invasion. No one remembers Guadalcanal, or Tarawa. Nor do they look to the huge tolls taken at Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Whereas 'Band of Brothers' commendably addressed the 'Battle of the Bulge', little has been mentioned of the Malmedy massacre, nor of the incredibly brave pilots who flew over 'the Hump' to keep the bomber bases in China supplied to continue the offensive against Japan. This is not taught. And even though 'Rosie the Riveter' is emphasized, the nurses at Corregidor are ignored.
Time constraints are always given to explain why WW2 and other wars get short shrift in the classroom. And now they want to cut schooling time back. If all we teach our students is that the U.S. perpetually performed shameful acts, then we undermine and destroy the memory of men and women who acted in a time of brutality to try and free the entire world from tyranny, oppression, and murder. And that is just wrong. Plain and simple.
: 2:29 PM
: 11:03 PM
I think the teachers union and the federal government should get out of the education business. Let the states run their schools.
: 8:25 AM
http://www.njcu.edu/programs/jchistory/Pages/B_Pages/Black_Tom_Explosion.htm
: 2:35 PM
: 2:57 PM
Seven Mexican nationals fought on the side of the Republic of Texas inside the Alamo. Misguided, misinformed, close-minded (yes, being "liberal" doesn't mean "open-minded", I believe they're less willing to learn) and idealogically radical leftists are destroying this country's future by denying its past. Worse, half the time they don't even know the pertinent facts. "The man is bad", "any person who isn't an upper-middle class white male" is good, and "our country is generally wrong and we have to make amends for all the perceived ills of the past."
Very few U.S. high school students will learn what my grandfather (a WWII Corsair pilot) knew; 9 out of 10 Allied P.O.W.s captured by the Japanese were violently tortured. Most were killed after having been toretured, beaten, and psychologically abused. Will this be read to students before or after the talk of the "Japanese prison camps"? Neither. Most don't know it at all and never will.
They say history is written by the winners. I say it's being re-written by the whiners.
Looks like Thomas Jefferson was right, we need a revolution about every so often to keep things on the right track.
Bob W. - Texas
: 12:09 PM
