ARTICLE: Ten Years After: How Not to Teach About the Iraq War

[Ryan Goble]

Ten Years After: How Not to Teach
About the Iraq War

By Bill Bigelow

Co-director of the Zinn Education Project and curriculum editor  

of Rethinking Schools

 

In 2006, with U.S. troops occupying Iraq, the great historian and humanitarian Howard Zinn expressed his desire for the end of the war: "My hope is that the memory of death and disgrace will be so intense that the people of the United States will be able to listen to a message that the rest of the world, sobered by wars without end, can also understand: that war itself is the enemy of the human race."

 

At least in a formal sense, our country's memories of war are to be found in school history textbooks. Exactly a decade after the U.S. invasion, those texts are indeed sending "messages" to young people about the meaning of the U.S. war in Iraq. But they are not the messages of peace that Howard Zinn proposed. Not even close. Read more.

 

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"Ten Years After: How Not to Teach About the Iraq War" is the newest article in the Zinn Education Project's column called If We Knew Our History posted on Common Dreams, GOOD magazine, and the Huffington Post.