Speaking only for some of the Allied powers, I can say that it happened almost immediately. There had already been a large trade in books and other educational materials for children about the war even while the conflict was still raging (most of it quite limited in its scope and depth, as you may expect), with things like alphabet books proving strangely popular -- see this British one from 1914, for example, or this French one from 1918. There were also extremely condensed and sanitized accounts of the fighting in major campaigns released for young readers, as well as a just unbelievable number of novels and story collections based on child-friendly heroes doing their bit, usually with titles like The Famous Twins at Cambrai or Mary and Rose with the Serbian Retreat. These are just hypothetical names, I should be clear -- I regret that I don't have any of these books in front of my just now, and my notes on this subject are in my other office. In any event, the goal of all this wartime material aimed at both the education and entertainment of children was primarily patriotic; there was (I would say understandably) no attempt to look at the conflict from a neutral and distant perspective, and absolutely nothing in the way criticism to be offered for one's own nation's role in the ongoing war.

The war's conclusion saw swift attempts to make the whole thing cohere in a way that would suit lesson plans, but this extremely self-serving perspective would linger for quite some time. The materials that appeared suggest some interesting (and not always positive) things about the goals of those producing them.

Take The Great War in Verse and Prose, for example, which was released in 1919. This volume was compiled by the prominent Canadian educator J.B. Wetherell for use in Ontario schools, and it would eventually see distribution throughout the country more broadly. The volume was designed for the use of Ontario students of all ages, with selections of what was then considered to be the war’s greatest English poetry included alongside extracts from major speeches, articles, military and diplomatic communiqués, and other mostly non-literary prose. H.J. Cody, Ontario’s Minister of Education, describes the volume’s intent in his introduction:

"The selections of Verse and Prose in this book set forth the varying and successive phases of the War, and seek to remind, to inform, and to inspire. The teachers will use them as vehicles of moral and patriotic instruction. The pupils will keep them forever in their hearts and minds" (xx).

It may seem surprising now to encounter the suggestion that an elementary school pupil would keep forever in her heart and mind an extract from one of H.H. Asquith’s debates in the House of Commons, or a judiciously chosen passage from Raymond Poincaré’s address to the Paris conference, but such hopes are indicative of the tenor of the times. There had been attempts to force the war into an historical context from its very beginning, with some writers suggesting that it was the culmination of all previous history and others declaring it the opening stage of something entirely new. Countless attempts were made to connect it to previous conflicts, with obvious cases like the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 and the Napoleonic War rubbing shoulders with less-obvious ones like the War of Spanish Succession or the Hundred Years' War. Students being confronted with a text such as this were not only encouraged but actively mandated to consider the war within this broader context of what was hailed as a British-led liberal democracy standing up once and for all to centuries of Teutonic "militarism." There is no attempt made in materials such as this to encourage critical thinking, to challenge established narratives, or to reflect on the sort of problems (e.g. colonialist mentalities, secret diplomacy, propaganda, etc.) that have become de rigueur subjects in the classroom. It is a book that begins with Kipling and ends with the lyrics of "God Save the King;" its purpose should be clear.

With that goal in mind, the strange contours of the texts included in this particular volume begin to make sense. The large emphasis on documents commemorating and celebrating Lord Kitchener, for example, reinforces the then common view of the war as being another chapter in the ongoing story of Empire, continuing the successful colonial project that had found its greatest flowering in the century just concluded. Relatedly, the overwhelming preference in this anthology for texts taken from statesmen and generals reflects the still dominant view of war as a thing to be considered first from the top down -- a view with which I am by no means unsympathetic, but you can easily see the imbalance this creates given the near-total lack of material in this collection that looks at the war experientially rather than just strategically or politically.

This is nowhere more apparent than in the bloody-minded determination to include what Wetherell believed to be essential poetry related to the war, and it would be hard to find a part of this collection -- especially when it comes to the calculated impact on student readers -- that differs more from modern approaches. With the emphasis on formal and patriotic work by authors like Rudyard Kipling, Sir Henry Newbolt, Laurence Binyon and F.G. Scott, we see an extreme focus on the ideas of the war rather than its actual conduct. It's true that some actual combatant poets make their way into these pages, with both Rupert Brooke and Julian Grenfell being included, but their short-lived experience of the war before their notorious deaths was in no way typical of the average fighting man, and even less typical of the sort of trench-produced poetry that has come (regrettably) to dominate modern understandings of the war. One should not be surprised to find no Siegfried Sassoon or Robert Graves in here, but it's still worth noting all the same. The absence of Wilfred Owen and Isaac Rosenberg is less noteworthy, given their near total obscurity at the time, but Sassoon and Graves had at least been prominent poetical voices in the nascent Georgian scene prior to the war. They have been excluded here because of what they said, not because nobody knew they were saying it.

Anyway, this anthology is just one of many that came out in the war's immediate aftermath, and the ones found throughout the various Commonwealth countries all had similar tones to them. I can't speak for those in (for example) France or Germany, but I'd be very interested in hearing from someone who could. The point of such materials and lesson-plans in a Commonwealth context was to reinforce students' sense of the superiority of British liberal democracy, to confront them with the wider tapestry of history into which the war fit, and (without even the pretense of apology) to crow a little about having won the war in the first place.