Surely one needs to know what periods of history he focusses on before being able to answer?
If he’s focussing on the entire breadth of history then I can sort of see his point, you’ve got >5k years and tons of civilisations to potentially cover. My guess however is that he doesnt.
Otara
To address some of the questions that have arisen:
Wow. Just wow.
So if this guy doesn’t think the New Deal ended the Depression, and he thinks WWII wasn’t a big enough thing to end the Depression, then what *does *he think ended the Depression? A horde of Tooth Fairies?
How does he account for the vast numbers of Southeast Asian immigrants to the U.S., when everybody and his brother want to come here and can’t? And the racism against them from people who think they got it too easy coming over here and being “given” whatever they needed? And the influx of Eastern Europeans after the breakup of the Soviet empire and the end of the cold war? If he doesn’t think the New Deal ended the Depression, he must admit that WWII did.
I have noticed a lot of teachers with dogmatic views which are inconsistent with the evidence.
If he’s teaching US history rather than world history and arguing WW2 isnt a big thing, umm, wow.
Otara
I took a Recent History (1930-now) class at college. Our teacher warned us on the first day that keeping a neutral perspective is nearly impossible. A lot of the issues we studied are still playing out. For example the civil rights movement. I learned a lot about Dr. King, Selma Alabama, Water Hoses used against protesters in Birmingham etc. Obviously that issue is still not fully resolved.
It’s better to study history from a distance. But, you can learn a lot about recent history if you struggle to keep an open mind and look at it from different viewpoints.
I could see skipping over the military history of the war – battles, dates (with a few exceptions – Pearl Harbor, D-Day, Hiroshima, possibly Midway) --but not the forces that led to the war and the ramifications afterwards.
I don’t understand the political motivation? Because he’s right wing, he doesn’t think WWII is important? I don’t see the logic. Seems to me like WWII is often presented as a big rah-rah, America rocks, ass-kick fest where America beat the Nazis and saved Europe. I’m having a hard time attributing his unwillingness to teach it to his political persuasion, as opposed to say… ignorance.
To rephrase my question: Why would a conservative have any opposition to teaching WWII?
There’s no other way to pussyfoot around this…
World War II created the world we live in today. Full stop. There is nothing else to talk about. the Depression/Cold War/Vietnam/European Union/“War on Terror”? It all stems from the result of World War II. Every bit of it. There is not any part of our lives that is not effected by World War II. Your friend is deluded.
It’s one thing to avoid the minutia of WWII, because he could teach those same students for years and never get it all. But the results of the war are so important that without them there’s nothing else to talk about.
Because it was Democratic Presidents who led us during WWII.
On a more personal front, my dad fought in Korea. Until I was a full grown adult I had no freaking idea in the world what on earth the Korean War was all about. I’m still shaky on it. In fact, I know considerably more about the Norman Conquest than about the war my dad actually fought.
I hadn’t thought about that angle of it. You might be onto something there. He was very excited when he got back from some conference where a speaker outlined evidence that FDR’s programs didn’t end the Depression: he’d been vindicated!
The New Deal was never really designed to get us OUT of the Great Depression; its purpose was to ease the effects of the Great Depression on the millions of suffering Americans who were desperate for work. I don’t mind if this guy wants to argue that New Deal programs like social security ended up being too costly–I disagree but don’t mind arguing that. I do have trouble with someone so extremist that he can’t give a balanced view of the topic. But I digress.
It seems to me that WWII is important if for no other reason (and there are lots of other reasons) than that it was one of the great dramas of the 20th century. I know he doesn’t want to get bogged down on specific battles and troop movements. I agree with him there (except, as another poster said, for key battles like D-Day). But how do you pay lip service to something so important?
So maybe it does have something to do with those darn Democratic presidents.:rolleyes:
What’s this WW2 thing that Yanks keep yammerin’ on about.
Didn’t you guys only go into because 'dem silly Japs bombed your vacation islands?
We were hardly neutral before 1941.
If that was true they’d care about all the conservatives like Bush and Limbaugh who weaseled out of Vietnam, but they don’t in the slightest.
Personally, I wish that my high school teachers and earlier had taught about WWII, or WWI even. I don’t think they even ever got around to the 20th century; just going over the colonial period and the Civil War again and again, from high school and back as far as I can remember.
I agree with pretty much everybody that your friend is pretty nuts about WWII, OTOH, it’s not entirely nuts to discuss WWII as a consequence of issues raised and not resolved by WWI. So if that’s what he’s doing, I can almost see it. Almost, but… no.
As for Vietnam, I agree that it was a catalyst for many of the social divides we see today, but not a cause of them, IMO. And the lessons we might have and should have learned about the Vietnam War regarding intervening in local affairs, manufacturing foreign threats that didn’t really exist, etc., well, we apparently didn’t learn them. Hence Iraq, and to a lesser extent Afghanistan. So perhaps he thinks Vietnam isn’t important because it didn’t teach us to mind our manners on the world stage. But if he’s really conservative, that seems an unlikely rationale for him.
Naw, lots of people would disagree with you about that, because the United States definitely did not win in Korea. The United States did not win the Korean war, and it got its rear end bitten off by the Chinese. It barely saved face by getting China to agree to calling a “truce”.
Furthermore, Vietnam did not change anything.
The United States STILL fights undeclared wars all over the world, and the United States STILL has its troops in over 100 countries sticking its nose in other countries affairs. Since Vietnam, I dont think there has been a single year when the United States did not bomb somebody somewhere.
3. Third, nothing has changed because of the US going into Vietnam and losing 50,000 American lives and a million vietnam lives, Vietnam is still the unified independent communist country it was destined to be. All those American boys died for nothing, history was not changed. The United States trades with Vietnam and Nike makes shoes over there. There was no such thing as the: “Domino Effect”, and the rest of asia did not fall into communism.
Remember, It’s OK If You’re A Republican. :rolleyes:
Yes, too many courses in US history are taught like this:
John Adams: It doesn’t matter. I won’t be in the history books anyway, only you. Franklin did this and Franklin did that and Franklin did some other damn thing. Franklin smote the ground and out sprang George Washington, fully grown and on his horse. Franklin then electrified him with his miraculous lightning rod and the three of them - Franklin, Washington, and the horse - conducted the entire revolution by themselves.
[pause]
Dr. Benjamin Franklin: I like it.
As far as WW2, regardless of what happened in WW2, didnt Japan and Germany end up as 2 of the top counties in the world today?
Didnt Russia and China end up as the most threatening superpowers of the world anyways?
Although the United States “temporarily” had prosperity in the 1950’s and the 1960’s, isnt it fast going where it would have ended up anyways if there had not been a ww2? The United States is now becoming an energy-dependent, overpopulated country with too much debt, too much unemployment, too many poor people, and with no manufacturing and no industry. The United States is quickly headed back to the way it was in the 1930’s before ww2.
WW2 may have “interrupted” major world trends, adn may have caused a different way to end up where we did, but did ww2 really actually change anything?..I dont think so.
[quote=“Boyo_Jim, post:36, topic:555937”]
I agree with pretty much everybody that your friend is pretty nuts about WWII, OTOH, it’s not entirely nuts to discuss WWII as a consequence of issues raised and not resolved by WWI. So if that’s what he’s doing, I can almost see it. Almost, but… no.
He doesn’t spend much time on any of the 2oth century wars.