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Active Citizenship > Teaching War: Providing a
Different Perspective to Engage and Challenge Your Students
Teaching War: Providing a Different Perspective
to Engage and Challenge Your Students
By Dennis Showalter
Whe military experience of the
United States is not merely a diminishing presence in education—it
may be fading from the curriculum altogether. Educators at all
levels often downplay this integral part of U.S. history for a
variety of reasons. For example, they may dismiss war as primitive
and irrational and the study of war as immoral, appealing to what
literary critic Edmund Wilson called “patriotic gore”
and philosopher J. Glenn Gray described as “lust of the
eye.” Or they may simply view teaching war as legitimating
xenophobia and male privilege and distorting the U.S.’s
history by focusing affirmatively on its violent aspects.
To take such positions, though, is to ignore a strong pragmatic
reason for including military history in the curriculum. Given
that students are naturally attracted to the history of war and
warfare for its action and narrative, and that we are in a time
when apathy and alienation are of increasing concern to educators
at all levels, a subject that engages interest should by no means
be dismissed out of hand. In pedagogic terms, the spirited discussions
that can develop around themes from the Civil War, World War II,
or the Vietnam War facilitate the teacher’s functioning
as “guide on the side.” And while interest in war
is in no way gender-specific, disengaged boys, a growing concern
in secondary education, are more likely to be drawn into participation
by the chance to study that subject than by most other elements
of the curriculum.
Beyond its appeal in the classroom, it should be made clear to
students that war has indeed played a central role in the development
of societies and in the formation and survival of states. It was
certainly a part of prehistoric cultures and remains a dominant
form of interaction among peoples and governments to this day.
Consider, for instance, the role that war has played in intellectual
life. Science, mathematics, philosophy—all have been shaped,
at times defined, by their relationships to conflict. To deny
this is not merely to rewrite history, but to reject it in favor
of a version that, although kinder and gentler, is also totally
imaginary—a corruption of education’s ethical and
intellectual aspects alike. Military history, in other words,
offers a viable perspective on the human condition, meriting consideration
alongside cultural, religious, gender, and economic history. And
it serves to remind us all of our personal stake in the survival
of the United States.
“Good ambition is the passion of a great character. Those
endowed with it may perform very good or very bad acts. All depends
on the principles which direct them.”
—Napoleon Bonaparte
In order to cultivate the citizenship
and community so essential to the nation’s well-being, it
is imperative that one include an understanding of the United
States’ military experience as well as its wars. At the
basic level, this involves awareness of the unique, complex relationship
of government, people, and armed forces under the U.S. Constitution,
as well as a true grasp of the balance of powers, which is vital
in a military context. The balance of powers has helped Congress
to maintain civilian control of the military, has endowed the
commander-in-chief with the powers to make war effectively, and
has enabled the judicial system to step in if need be. Such a
system is not self-sustaining; it requires the steady input of
citizens who understand the relationship between United States
military history and its civic institutions.
To understand this relationship is to understand that citizenship
in a democracy is predicated on the general concept of a synergy
of rights and responsibilities. Presenting military service as
one of the focal points of citizenship in a democracy can help
to bridge the enduringly vexing gap between the respective claims
of individuals and communities. In war—the ultimate test
of civic order—neither individual nor community is likely
to survive without the other. And in an era of massive cross-cultural
migration, the importance of service in arms is a time-tested,
time-honored means of bonding newer citizens with older ones.
We must also remind ourselves that the United States was founded
on a strong classical heritage. In Greco-Roman culture, which
formed the root of our present-day system of government, voluntary
military service was understood as an essential aspect of citizenship—a
key distinction between the citizen and the subject, with subjects
serving under compulsion. In the U.S. form, service can be direct
and voluntary, or structured through administrative systems like
selective service. The fundamental link between service and citizenship
nevertheless remains constant: a free people securing its rights
by accepting the responsibility to defend those rights in arms.
The study of military history further contributes to citizenship
by providing intellectual and informational matrices for addressing
questions of national interest and security, questions essential
to a citizenry. War is not going to vanish from the world in any
calculable time frame, nor can the U.S. avoid conflict by sealing
itself off politically or psychologically. Students correspondingly
need to understand the causes and conduct of past wars—why
the U.S. has asserted itself in arms, and how it has reacted.
At a different level, the inclusion of military history in the
secondary curriculum also fosters links with life outside school
in the form of media and entertainment. Series with military themes,
like HBO’s Band of Brothers and the History Channel’s
Mail Call, populate programming on television. Books
and magazines on military subjects top the list of history publications
marketed to the general public, and the majority of these are
written in a dramatic, narrative form designed to engage readers.
That is a quality not to be ignored—one that may even lure
otherwise reluctant students into the terra incognita of a Borders
or a Barnes & Noble as they seek to follow up issues raised
in class. Such integration is valuable—one might say essential—to
a democracy that cannot afford to see its educational systems
become inward-looking.
Military history makes one final and important contribution in
the classroom: it facilitates perspective. Fostering a complete
and humble view of the United States’ role in the world
properly contextualizes the student’s understanding not
just of U.S. history, but also of its contemporary battles and
wars.
It seems clear that the political and social systems of the U.S.
depend fundamentally on an informed, committed citizen body—more
so now, in an age of global immigration, than ever before. The
kind of civic identity that creates and sustains community requires
cultivation. Cultivation begins with history, and history begins
in the classroom.
The core value of Essential Histories is that each volume
contextualizes the war it analyzes. The texts address the diplomacy
that antedates campaigns and battles and the politics that accompany
them. Douglas Meed’s The
Mexican War presents a clash between systems so different
that their only common trait was courage. Charles Robinson’s
The
Plains Wars 1757–1900 is a tour de force analyzing
the struggle for control of the Great Plains, from the first Spanish
penetrations to the aftermath of Wounded Knee. In Wars
of the Barbary Pirates, Gregory Fremont-Barnes presents
U.S. reaction to the seizure of its ships and men by highlighting
the new nation’s connections with Old Europe. On more familiar
ground, Daniel Marston’s The American Revolution, 1776–1783
covers the operational side of the American Revolution in a way
nicely complementing a course taught from a social/cultural perspective.
Marston’s The
French-Indian War 1754–1760 illuminates the complex
interaction of European, Euro-American, and Native American cultural-political
systems. Andrew Wiest’s The Vietnam War, 1965–1975
devotes no less attention to the multifaceted protest movement
in the U.S. than to the air and ground wars in Indochina. The
series volumes also incorporate wider cultural and social elements.
The current capstone of Osprey’s contribution to the study
of U.S. wars is Rolling
Thunder in a Gentle Land, edited by Andrew Wiest and
developed from his Vietnam War volume in the Essential Histories
series. It includes fifteen chapters that, in three hundred pages,
combine to provide the best overview of the war in print. Each
chapter addresses an essential aspect of the war, and each is
written by an acknowledged expert in that subject area. Able to
stand as a main text, with collateral reading assigned to supplement
it, Rolling Thunder in a Gentle Land conveys strategy
and tactics, the Vietnamese civilian experience, the role of U.S.
media and public opinion, and the experience of the South Vietnamese
armed forces—all reinforced by Osprey’s outstanding
maps and graphics.
DENNIS SHOWALTER is a Professor
of History at Colorado College and Past President of the Society
for Military History. As Joint Editor of War in History,
he specializes in comparative military history. His recent monographs
include The Wars of Frederick the Great (London: Longman,
1996); Tannenberg: Clash of Empires (Washington, D.C.:
Brassey’s, 2004), and Patton and Rommel: Men of War
in the Twentieth Century (New York: Berkeley, 2005).
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