The Wartime Generation without a War
Part Three: The Changing Classroom
Thanks for returning to our discussion of the lack of wartime information that flowed to millennials and Gen Z during the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars. If you’ve read Part One and Part Two of this series, then you know that the environment in the US was hostile to dissent in the lead up to the Iraq War and that the demographics of both the country and of the military specifically changed drastically in the lead up to 9/11.
Today we’re discussing a foundational reason that most millennials grew up without the wars as a part of their every day: the changing face of education in the early 2000s. Two main factors were at play here during this time: passage of the No Child Left Behind Act in 2002, and the cooling of free speech rights in the classroom as a result of conversation around the Iraq War.
No Child Left Behind
No Child Left Behind completely transformed the way we measure success for students. In a misguided attempt to address success gaps between communities of color, impoverished communities, and wealthier, white communities, No Child Left Behind essentially set out to test the way out of the problem. The idea that you cannot fix what you cannot measure lay at the foundation of the new standardized testing.
For many at the time, the data already existed — no schools with the kinds of performance which would later receive an F under No Child Left Behind were under the impression that they were performance all stars. Education advocates rightly feared that this “grading” system for schools would simply offer free marketing for districts who were already doing well, and punitive measures for underfunded, under-resourced schools.
Teachers also rightly feared that the new standardized testing would simply be a new name for the instinct to supplant expansive curriculum in pursuit of teaching to a test. Several states at the time already had implemented their own versions of standardized testing, as most millennials will remember. In the video below, you can view a discussion of the results downstream thirteen years after the passage of the original law.
For millennials, this conversation was taking place after the very youngest of us had left the public school system altogether. The time when flexible curriculum would have shaped citizens with a civic conscious had passed. In service to what some educators believed to be arbitrary standards, true discussion on current events or engaging in community discussions was often set aside in favor of less timely, but more testable topics.
The Beginning of the End for Teacher’s Free Speech
Deborah Mayer was teaching a mixed age class of third through sixth graders in 2003 using a Time for Kids article about peace marches against the Iraq War. As kids do, one student interjected to ask if Ms. Mayer was in favor of peace.
In what I would call a master class move, she responded that she had honked when she saw a sign that said “Honk for Peace.” But even this innocuous answer drew the ire of the community, resulting in a school-wide memo stating that the Iraq War was “none of our business,” and the non-renewal of Mayer’s teaching contract that fall.
On behalf of her free speech rights, Mayer took her case up to the Seventh Court of Appeals, where the judge ruled that Mayer did not have a right to free speech with a “captive audience”.
An earlier case, Garcetti v. Ceballos (2006) laid the foundation for this ruling. In this case, a government employee had sued on behalf of their own free speech rights. The courts ruled against the plaintiff and established the precedent of “routine duties”. According to the routine duties precedent, an employee did not have free speech rights if the speech was a part of their routine duties.
In Mayer’s case, the combination of her students being a captive audience and the fact that her routine duties consisted almost entirely of speech led to a denial of her right to discuss the Iraq War with her students. The court not only ruled against Mayer, but gave school districts huge leeway in deciding when teachers had strayed from approved curriculum.
We can see echoes of that decision today with laws like Florida’s Don’t Say Gay ban on teaching sexuality and gender to children in public schools.
Approved curricula, approved speech, and the cooling of off-curriculum topics (like current events) are legacies of these cases that were taking place during the most crucial phases of the war. Teachers would have been forced to rely on school boards choosing textbooks and curriculum at the most contemporary standards in order to legally lead discussions on the ongoing war.
These contemporary textbooks, even if approved, were very unlikely to actually make it into the hands of students. For example, a history professor describes looking at the 2009 of his daughter’s approved history textbook “Out of Many: A History of the American People.” The discussion of the wars was nuanced and acknowledged the failure of the American intelligence apparatus to give true information to the public, earning his outright approval. But when he went to look at the version of the textbook his daughter’s district was actually using, he realized students were accessing information from 2003.
This is an incredibly common occurrence for school districts. The average approved textbook goes out of date every three years, and yet the adoption cycle for most textbooks is every five to seven years. As digital textbooks have become more of a norm for higher wealth communities, even today many public schools rely solely on their outdated hardback counterparts. This was especially true when the majority of millennials would have been receiving their civic understanding of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
There were absolutely exceptions to the rule. I was able to find curriculum from 2009 with a really great discussion section wherein students are literally asked to debate the merits of the war after watching a Frontline documentary I used in my own research. But to teach this curriculum would mean that many teachers were going off the beaten path from the state-approved curriculum laid out for their classroom.
The combination of teaching to the test, the cooling of teacher’s rights to choose their curriculum and discussion topics, and the movement of school district’s toward enforcing approved speech and approved curriculum meant that for many of us (especially those who were publicly educated), discussion of the wars would have essentially been non-existent in the classroom.
The effect is that the wars were not a large part of the millennial world framework, even though the most important decisions in Iraq and Afghanistan were taking place during our formative years.
Next installment we will be getting into the meat of the media’s failure to cover the wars. Make sure to subscribe so you don’t miss a thing!
Missed Part One or Part Two? Check them out here:
The Wartime Generation without a War
Programming Note: Thanks for your patience during my summer break! I’m excited to get back to this work, and have now added a Patreon for you to support me if you don’t want to become a Substack paid subscriber.
The Wartime Generation Without a War
Welcome back for Part Two in the Media Made Me series: The Wartime Generation Without a War. In case you missed Part One, you can read that here. In this series, we’re taking a deep dive into why the vast majority of millennials and Gen Z Americans grew up without the Iraq and Afghanistan wars being a central feature of their lives.