Drawing Back the Curtain, Part I: What Academic Historians Should Know About How Military History is Taught at the Secondary Level

I write this article for the academic historians in the audience. It is primarily for those of us who teach the complicated stories we uncover in archives and read in our colleagues’ writings; it’s for those of us who love what we do but who nonetheless find ourselves grumbling under our breaths (or sometimes out loud), “Why don’t our students know this?  Why didn’t they learn it in high school?”

More specifically, given the platform of this particular article, I imagine that when we military historians grumble, we wonder why more students don’t come to college with even a basic understanding of the themes and ideas that form the backbone of our field.  Why are such topics as civil-military relations; the role of the military as an institution within the larger society; or how specific decisions, environments, technologies, and circumstances affect operations so rarely discussed in those terms at the secondary level?

 In other words, why is it that what we, as military historians, do compares so poorly with what students are asked to learn across the nation?

 Here, I suggest some answers and then put forward some relatively simple steps that we, as scholars and professors, can (and should) take to close this gap.

 The first thing that we can do is to understand the systems that lead to the disconnect between academic history and history at the secondary level.

Obviously, there are many factors that influence students’ learning.  Ongoing research shows that students struggle to learn for a variety of reasons, including home environment, past trauma, and a whole host of factors that are not in schools’ direct control.  Never mind the ways the teaching of social studies has been politicized, the tremendous pressure placed on most teachers to “finish” sprawling curricula by the end of term or academic year, and the myriad directions teachers are pulled daily.  Depth of content is not a luxury most secondary teachers are afforded.

 But that doesn’t mean teachers don’t try.  Teachers choose what to teach based on two considerations.  The first is what their state requires them to teach as outlined in state educational standards.  The second is what they – the teachers – deem important.  Teachers, especially social studies teachers, never limit themselves only to the standards.  They structure their lesson plans around the concepts, anecdotes, and facts they find most interesting or that they think will most interest their students.  Most teachers work really hard to engage their students with the same history they find engaging. Many participate in content-based professional development courses, read in their “off” time, and collaborate with others to deepen their own knowledge.

 But just as no student ever absorbs every detail or concept taught by their teachers or professors, neither did secondary teachers absorb every detail or concept when they themselves were students. And given the widely varied quality of military history books on bookstore shelves or in Amazon’s search algorithms, those looking for the latest scholarship are often stymied. Just like the rest of us, teachers don’t always know what they don’t know, which puts them in a tough spot when they try to learn more.

 The most obvious place teachers should be able to turn – state standards – offer little help.

 Generally speaking, there are two different kinds of social studies standards in the United States.  The first type of standard is content-based. This is the type of standard that most of us probably think of if we stop to consider state educational standards.  They focus on specific information teachers should cover, and, in those states with high-stakes testing in social studies like New York and Texas, they provide an outline of the content that will appear on the state-level tests. They tend to read like an outline of a textbook, organized chronologically and jammed with names and specific events. Texas’s (in)famous Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills Standards, or TEKS, are content-based. As the Texas State Board of Education’s repeated fights over who to include and who leave out illustrate, content-based standards are both highly politicized and extraordinarily dry. 

 The second and increasingly more common type of standard is thematic. This type of standard focuses on broad themes and patterns in history as well as on historical skills. These standards are purposely designed to be broad so that teachers can focus on historical processes and connections. Rather than appearing in a list or outline format, thematic standards are often represented visually as matrices that tie historical skills, such as “asking questions,” to themes or ideas, such as “turning points” or “foreign policy.”  Like content-based standards, thematic standards are political and politicized documents, but they tend to elicit less visceral partisan backlash because they are vague.

 Neither content-based nor thematic standards offer teachers much guidance as they plan their lessons. For illustration, imagine a new teacher trying to develop a lesson on some aspect of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II. I’ve chosen this example both because of the war’s lasting global impact and because students and teachers tend to be interested in it.  The specific topic of atomic deployment, moreover, has multiple different entry points for lessons in both American history and World history classrooms, including lessons centered around ethics, choice, diplomacy, strategy, memory, and human experience.  In other words, for the purposes of this piece, it’s a really easy example.

 The relevant section of the American History TEKS (which, remember, are content-based), asks students to “analyze major issues of World War II, including the Holocaust; the internment of German, Italian, and Japanese Americans as a result of Executive Order 9066; and the development of conventional and atomic weapons.” The World History TEKS ask students to “explain the major causes and events of World War II,” including “the dropping of the atomic bombs.” Neither of these standards offer much guidance to teachers looking to analyze larger historical debates around the decision to use or the consequences of using these weapons.  The US history standards frame the issue solely around the technology’s “development,” and the world history standards simply frame their use as “an event.”

 My own state of Iowa, which employs thematic principles in its Iowa Core Standards in Social Studies, is equally if differently problematic.  A series of skills-based “content anchor standards,” such as “Critique Historical Sources and Evidence” and “Justify Causation and Argumentation,” appear at every grade level from kindergarten through twelfth grade, offering teachers a model of how to scaffold skills in increasingly complex ways as students grow.  Each course then has its own discipline-based set of standards that is supposed to work with the skills standards. So, for example, A U.S. history teacher looking for a standard related to the atomic bomb won’t find atomic weapons listed anywhere.  But any US history lesson the teacher ultimately created would fit standard SS-US.9-12.26, “Determine multiple and complex causes and effects of historical events in American history including, but not limited to, the Civil War, World War I and II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War.”  A world history lesson would match to standard SS-WH.9-12.18, “Assess the impact of conflict and diplomacy on international relations.” This type of standard offers teachers tremendous freedom of choice in how they focus their lessons, but thematic standards don’t offer much guidance about how to determine that direction.

 Within the frameworks established by state standards, therefore, two major problems arise.  In states that use content-based standards, there’s little acknowledgement of the big questions military historians ask themselves.  State boards of education certainly aren’t nudging teachers to consider the relationship between the military as an institution and society at large, for example.  The questions of who serves, how they serve, and why they serve in any given place or time are limited to fly-bys about integration and segregation in US history and ignored entirely in every other context.  Texas, for example, frames the World War II US homefront around “how American patriotism inspired exceptional actions by citizens and military personnel” and leaves out everything else.  Conversely, there is room for the big questions in thematic standards, but teachers have to generate the questions themselves.  Military history as a field of inquiry has not filtered down to the various bodies writing these standards.

 The end result of this cycle, I would argue, is that military history at the secondary level often falls into one of two categories.  Most commonly, teachers with the best of intentions end up presenting war as a series of rote categories, usually focusing on the causes and consequences of war or on propaganda, technology, battles, and/or the roles of marginalized groups within a given conflict. Second, teachers with prior interest in warfare or military history sometimes bog down in minutiae about weapons or battles. Either way, students have trouble connecting those facts to their larger significance.

 So, if students at the secondary level are to learn anything beyond simply that things happened, it will be up to the teachers to take the initiative to push students in that direction.  Secondary teachers need to move students beyond the whats and ask them to consider the hows and the whys. But, if secondary teachers are to ask their students questions like why Truman ultimately decided to deploy the atomic bomb, why it was Truman and not military officers who made the decision, or how and why technological advances revolutionized warfare, or any of the other myriad questions associated with the subject, teachers both need to feel comfortable teaching these topics and think these topics are important.

 And this is where we, as military historians, come in.

 In a 2007 article in the AHA’s Perspectives, Social Studies Education researcher Bruce VanSledright exhorted college professors to “think of history teaching” in “systemic terms.” I would like to remind us all of this message.  Anyone who teaches history at the college level teaches future teachers, whether those students have declared education majors or not. We are, in essence, teacher educators as well as professional historians because we are part of the American educational system.  In this capacity, it is incumbent upon us, as historians, to help future teachers shape their curricula. 

 If secondary teachers ignore military history, or focus on the History Channel’s version of it, or treat military history as a series of categories to check off – as many of our own teachers did – it is because we haven’t taught them in terms that translate from a college lecture hall or seminar room to a secondary classroom. 

 So, in short, the message of this piece is advocacy for our profession, but in a different way from how we usually think of advocacy.  On one level, it would be helpful if a broad range of historians, including military historians, would volunteer to help write state social studies standards or do more workshops with practicing teachers.  But on a second – and more immediate -- level, I would like to encourage military historians to directly address the future teachers in their classrooms – to frame their courses in such a way that the big themes are clearly visible and explicitly linked to the mission of public education. 

 Doing this is a matter of pedagogy rather than content.  I am not suggesting radical restructuring of courses or dedicated sections for pre-service teachers.  Rather, I’m advocating for explicit acknowledgment of the fact that future teachers populate our courses.  Based on feedback I’ve received from my own students, I know that stopping a lecture for 30 seconds to address the would-be teachers in the room can have a powerful effect.  Saying something as simple as, “This is an important theme that you may want to think about when you teach,” forces education students to step out of a passive (and let’s face it, sometimes lacksadaisical) student mode. Such statements help them realize that what they are learning will have relevance well past the semester’s final exam and explicitly acknowledge the importance of learning through the eyes of a future teacher.  In other words, professors can help future teachers connect the current course’s content to the future that students imagine for themselves. Drawing these connections to the fore increases the odds that the content (and perhaps the method) will later appear in secondary classes down the line.

 In short, if we ever want to stop grumbling about what our students don’t know or what they should know, we have to ensure that their secondary teachers are both willing and able to teach those things our profession has deemed important. Since the historians teach the teachers, we only get to stop grumbling when we willingly take our place within the larger educational system.