[Link] The Smart Set: Classroom Wars - July 27, 2011
My God, this article about the normalization and valorization of war by well-meaning, run-of-the-mill history classes in American schools basically says everything I want to say about the contrasting treatment of war in A Song of Ice and Fire, which has moved and challenged me in more ways than I can say. When you start writing heroic fiction professionally, as I have recently done, you really start to wonder what it is you’re telling children. I will quote from it at length:
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“Violence is the spirituality of our society,” Wink writes. “It has virtually been accorded the status of a religion.” He suggests, however, that few real religious systems have ever been as successful as the myth of redemptive violence “in its ability to catechize its young so totally.” And so we come back around to the work of history teachers, history students, and the war stories we tell.
Of all the epochs, events, and ideas we could study, war seems to grab a disproportionately large chunk of time in many classrooms around the country. If violence truly is the spirituality of our society, then, I fear that we as teachers and students of history have become its theologians. While Faust rightly questions historians’ love for imposing orderly and moral narratives on the violence of war, those of us who make these stories popular and available — news media, parents, classroom teachers — have the chance to stop accepting simple narratives and theological renderings of redemptive violence-as-history.
Indeed, it hardly seems possible to write about events of violence without giving them some organization and infusing them with some meaning. Historians and history teachers are in the business of corralling disparate facts into some sort of interpretive coherence. It’s not if we’re making meaning, then, but how. Must we always impose this myth, invest seemingly tragic and gratuitously violent events with metaphysical significance, theologize our way into “just war” and lives lost so “that nation might live?” Must the teachers be catechized into these simplistic mythic structures, and must we catechize the children as well?
I fear that those of us who stand up in front of America’s children every day have made a Faustian bargain. In accepting history courses shaped by war and structured around war, we allow our students to internalize war as normal, constant, at times attractive. In telling stories about war, we fall back on noble explanatory devices and encourage our students to appreciate high moral outcomes over bodies on the ground.
In The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien writes:
A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.
In how we teach war — indeed, in trying to justify our fascination with war — we have perhaps tried too hard to bend the arc of the moral universe toward justice. And if we insist on such narratives, is it any surprise that our students will grow up seeing the world through them, making decisions based on them, building a future that runs by the same storyline?
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Read the whole thing.
