(via Joanne Jacobs) With the 60th anniversary of D-Day, perhaps I'm particularly vulnerable to this kind of a story but I just can't get over how pathetic it is -

Tiffany Charles got a B in history last year at her Montgomery County high school, but she is not sure what year World War II ended. She cannot name a single general or battle, or the man who was president during the most dramatic hours of the 20th century.

Yet the 16-year-old does remember in some detail that many Japanese American families on the West Coast were sent to internment camps. "We talked a lot about those concentration camps," she said

As Washington begins a massive Memorial Day weekend celebration of the new National World War II Memorial on the Mall, interviews with national education experts, teachers and more than 100 public school students suggest that Charles' limited knowledge of that momentous conflict is typical of today's youths.

Among 76 teenagers interviewed near their high schools this week in Maryland, Virginia and the District, recognition of the internment camps, a standard part of every area history curriculum, was high -- two-thirds gave the right answer when asked what happened to Japanese Americans during the war. But only one-third could name even one World War II general, and about half could name a World War II battle.

Diane Ravitch, an educational historian at New York University, said the big emphasis in high schools today is on the internment camps, as well as women in the workforce on the home front and discrimination against African Americans at home and in the armed services.

"Then, too, there was a war in the Atlantic and Pacific," she said.

God this makes me angry.   Rosie the Riveter is an important story no doubt - but D-Day is far greater.    I hate to think that for some of these kids the central conflict of WWII was possibly the fight to free Japanese from American Internment camps.  Personally, I fault a 60's throwback education establishment trying to prevent glorifying war and aggressiveness out of the goodness of their hearts.  For example, David Greenberg, a professor of History at Yale makes the following arguments -

...the D-Day enthusiasm, like all rituals of memory, says more about the present than it does about the past.

...the current D-Day obsession also feeds off and perpetuates a romance with war and militarism.

...The Vietnam War, which proved that pure might not only can't always bring peace but often can't even win wars, further muted the urge to sentimentalize combat. As part of the generational revolt against Cold War dogma, the very ideas of battlefield valor and sacrifice were recast as mystifications. A handful of hippies placed flowers in soldiers' gun barrels; many more Americans embraced, to varying degrees, the era's skepticism of military values.

...The romance with World War II grunts and their courage on the beaches of France reflects more than a due regard for the feats of a dying generation. It represents a change of heart among their baby-boom children, who since entering middle age have sought to atone for the stern rejection of militaristic values and the insufficient appreciation of their fathers' heroism that they displayed when coming of age during Vietnam.

Well if a guy @ Yale is saying that, how can HS History classes be too far behind?  Greenberg is sympathetic towards our memories of Vietnam - despite the artifacts of that failed war - while casting a relatively harsh eye towards WWII because Vietnam was supposed to teach us never to go to war again.

The problem however, as John Stuart Mill eloquently noted, is that war is simply not the worst thing that humans face.   What's far worse is forgetting that there are abstract concepts and ideals that are worth tangibly fighting and dying for.  Perhaps more importantly, and at the minimum, we must recognize the magnitude of the sacrifice from folks before us and the degree to which our lives glibly ride on the Freedom they gave us.   It was precisely their actions which today reduce the risk that any one of us will be called upon to make the same sacrifice.  

To try to reduce the role of conflict and bloodshed in the shaping of human history is to deny rather fundamental aspects of nature itself.   To talk of internment and discrimination at the exclusion of battle falsely reinforces a view that Cosmic Justice and universal a priori rights are somehow the norm in history & passive products of nature rather than the precious and fought for exception.   Stains of Japanese Internment and African American discrimination should not overshadow the sacrifice of some 400,000 Americans who died to preserve the patina of Justice that gives these so-called history educators their entire relevance.  

The David Greenbergs consider this world natural & expected but a soldier in a foxhole is holding up that ivory tower.   In their zeal to sweep diminish some of the false glory, they also throw out the Real Glory and, perhaps more ominously, a warning from history about the types of intentions that lurk within mens souls but don't make for either pleasant reading or dinner conversation.   For these folks, liberty can only be provided "by the exertions of better men than himself."

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UPDATE - VDH speaketh -

Our Real Dilemma. We do have a grave problem in this country, but it is not the plan for Iraq, the neoconservatives, or targeting Saddam. Face it: This present generation of leaders at home would never have made it to Normandy Beach. They would instead have called off the advance to hold hearings on Pearl Harbor, cast around blame for the Japanese internment, sued over the light armor and guns of Sherman tanks, apologized for bombing German civilians, and recalled General Eisenhower to Washington to explain the rough treatment of Axis prisoners.

We are becoming a crazed culture of cheap criticism and pious moralizing, and in our self-absorption may well lose what we inherited from a better generation. Our groaning and hissing elite indulges itself, while better but forgotten folks risk their lives on our behalf in pretty horrible places.

Judging from our newspapers, we seem to care little about the soldiers while they are alive and fighting, but we suddenly put their names on our screens and speak up when a dozen err or die. And, in the latter case, our concern is not out of respect for their sacrifice but more likely a protest against what we don't like done in our name. So ABC's Nightline reads the names of the fallen from Iraq, but not those from the less controversial Afghanistan, because ideological purity — not remembering the departed per se — is once again the real aim.

Amen.

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