20. Teaching World War II
During the baby boom of the 1950s and 1960s American history classes taught the United States won the Second World War and introduced the atomic age. Americans saved a heroic Britain, freed France, and destroyed Japan, after which they rebuilt it as an ally. The Soviet contributions to the defeat of Nazism were largely ignored in American textbooks, chiefly because of the hostilities of the Cold War. When teaching the war and its causes, age-appropriate materials, widely available online, should be applied. Much of the photographic record of the war is inappropriate for children below the upper elementary school grades. Atrocities committed by all sides, similarly inappropriate for younger children, should be presented and discussed at the high school level, including the Holocaust and its horrors.
The massive war in eastern Europe, which contributed more casualties to the total death count than any other theater of the war, likewise needs to wait until high school, or at least late middle school, for presentation. Once again many films, including documentaries, present the Eastern Front, many in graphic detail. Thousands of websites focus on the combat on the front, as well as the atrocities committed by the Germans and the Soviets against each other’s troops and civilians. So should the presentation of the decades of mutual suspicion between the United States and its allies, and the Soviets, which remains in place today. Younger students today are often astounded to learn the United States and the Russians once fought together as powerful, albeit suspicious allies.