Hello everyone,
When most people learn about WW1, we're in school, and teachers and books will tell us that what caused the war was the assassination of Franz-Ferdinand by Gavrilo Princip and the chain of alliances that followed that caused the war. However, after reading a few books, it seems clear that if the assassination was the match that started the fire, all countries involved were ready and waiting for the war, even had moved some of their troops already.
However, we're told that without this single assassination, that war would've never started, even if we're given a bit of details we're never told as if countries involved wanted that war, but more as if it was a kind of accident in a heated period.
So why do we keep that explanation instead of taking a few more paragraphs to have a better picture of what happened back then?
I disagree with your premise.
I have three different high school world history textbooks on my shelf right now. All of them have sections devoted to the causes of WWI. In these sections, all of them have multiple pages on the long and medium term causes of the war - rising militarism/the dreadnought race, the alliance system, German imperial ambitions, rising nationalism, etc. Yes they all say the assassination was the spark that led to war, and they discuss the July Crisis, but they all devote more lines/paragraphs to the other causes.
The books are:
A History of Western Society, McKay
A History of the Modern World, Palmer
Modern World History, McDougal Littell
Hi there! You’ve asked a question along the lines of ‘why didn’t I learn about X’. We’re happy to let this question stand, but there are a variety of reasons why you may find it hard to get a good answer to this question on /r/AskHistorians.
Firstly, school curricula and how they are taught vary strongly between different countries and even even different states. Additionally, how they are taught is often influenced by teachers having to compromise on how much time they can spend on any given topic. More information on your location and level of education might be helpful to answer this question.
Secondly, we have noticed that these questions are often phrased to be about people's individual experience but what they are really about is why a certain event is more prominent in popular narratives of history than others.
Instead of asking "Why haven't I learned about event ...", considering asking "What importance do scholars assign to event ... in the context of such and such history?" - the latter question is often closer to what to what people actually want to know and is more likely to get a good answer from an expert. If you intend to ask the 'What importance do scholars assign to event X' question instead, let us know and we'll remove this question.
Thank you!