Hi folks, I'm an Australian high school teacher finishing up our unit on World War Two. For non-Australians, Year 10s are 15-16 years old and one year off their senior school specialisations. Since this is the first year my school has taught this age bracket I'm about to review our program and thought I'd consult actual historians.
What do you wish high school teachers taught about this subject? Are there myths you want to see busted? Perspectives that are helpful (at a high school level)? What should a teenager know about WW2?
Please keep in mind that WW2 only gets about 20 hours of classtime with 25 or so un-scholarly teenagers who need their hands held at every step of the way (getting 8 bullet points of facts out of 3-4 pages of textbook over 2 hours of self-directed study was, shall we say, "A Bridge Too Far"). I'm also Australian, so there's less focus on things like Pearl Harbour or the Blitz, and I am already unusual among my colleagues for the depth with which I covered the European theatres.
For reference, this year I covered:
- The lead up to WW2 (emphasising the Treaty of Versailles, appeasement, and the attractiveness of dictatorship in the troubled '30s).
- Nazi Ideology (lebensraum, racial purity, autarky, social Darwinism, faith in strong leaders)
- The course of the war in Europe (2-3 bullet points each for the Mediterranean, Britain/Atlantic, and Continental European theatres, for each year)
- The Holocaust (emphasising the Einsatzgruppen and ghettos and not just Auschwitz)
- The Australian homefront (propaganda/censorship, internment, war restrictions, women's changing role)
- The war in the Pacific (Kokoda, Midway, the nuclear- and firebombing of Japan)
- Prisoners of War (emphasis on the Death Railway because of the Australian context).
- The post-war global order (VERY briefly, the rest of the history curriculum focuses on civil rights since 1945)
- Rise of fascism in Germany (end of term case study after assignments)
As for perspectives, I've emphasised that, "if you and I were in 1930s Germany we would probably have fallen for Nazi lies too", "Germany's industry could not compete with Russia and the USA", "Hitler was not insane (at least before the drug use late in the war)", "The Wehrmacht Was Not Clean", and "Imperial Japan was A Racist Death Cult With a Strong Religious Fervour Out For It's Own Slice of Imperialist Power".
The perspective of youth in Nazi Germany always stuck with me, so I appreciate you having that emphasis. I remember discussions in high school of the Hitler Youth for boys and girls, as well as how high school students in Imperial Japan were militarized. It gave a perspective of how indoctrination works. And even if I, egotistic at the time, never really truly believed that I would have been indoctrinated if I was in those circumstances, I remember having an appreciation for the importance of context and what I would now describe as structures of power.
I doubt you would have significant time for this, but I have always felt that WW2 education would benefit from introducing a more Asian focus specifically in chronology. What happens when we adopt the perspective of a Korean teenager growing up under Japanese colonial control? Or an Indonesian nationalist agitating against Dutch control? Looking at how the war can change from a 1939 to 1945 framing to something far longer could help push the importance of understanding WW2 as the culmination of violence throughout the "interwar" period.
The centrality of oil, food, and other natural resources in motivating the participants' decision to go to war. While WW2 represented a clash of ideologies, namely liberalism, communism, and fascism, it was just as much a war of empire. For Germany and Japan in particular, the decision to invade Eastern Europe and East Asia respectively was in large part driven by the need to control these resources vis a vis other great powers.
For further on this topic, I'd suggest looking into: The German oil crisis, Lebensraum, Germany's plan to capture the Baku oil fields, Japanese extraction of coal and iron in Manchuria, and The US oil embargo in the lead up to Pearl Harbor
Would also second a previous commenter's sentiment of a more Asia-centric telling of the war, since I would argue that WW2 began there with the Japanese invasion of China in the 30's
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