D-Day 75th anniversary: What Tennessee students learn in classrooms about WWII

The Allied invasion of Normandy, launched on June 6, 1944 — D-Day — was a milestone in world history.

But after 75 years crowded with momentous events, what do today’s students learn about the “Crusade in Europe,” as General (later President) Dwight Eisenhower called the battle to destroy Nazi Germany?

High school standards on U.S.  history lessons

Ron Martinez teaches AP U.S. history at Carter High School in Knoxville. He and another teacher also teach standard U.S. history classes. Most of their students are juniors and have heard the basics of World War II, Martinez said.

“For many of them it depends on what movies they watch,” he said. World War II draws more of a response than anything until the 1960s and Vietnam, which seem more immediate to students, Martinez said.

The standard history classes start with the 1870s, so there is no problem in getting as far as World War II — but it’s a race to get through the 1960s by the end of the school year, he said.

“We’ve gotten to the point where we try to rush through the beginning,” Martinez said.

All students are required to take U.S. history, he said. Classes have to cover 103 standards on which students will be tested, including 18 related to World War II, Martinez said. But today’s curriculum doesn’t focus on battles and landmark events such as D-Day.

“Most of the time we spend on World War II is probably on the years between the wars,” Martinez said. That includes a lot of 1930s diplomacy.

“Some of these things I had to look up when I first saw the standards,” he said.

As for the war itself, many of the standards deal with the social impact on women and minorities. The only standard that mentions D-Day specifically also asks students to understand the strategy behind many other major battles, Martinez said.

That doesn’t leave time to cover single events, even critical ones, in great detail, he said. But Martinez does talk about D-Day and show newsreel footage from the time, or “Saving Private Ryan.”

At West High School, Lou Gallo teaches AP history and International Baccalaureate courses; one of the latter is on 20th-century warfare.

“In all those classes there’s a World War II component,” he said.

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When Gallo himself was in high school, teachers often had to rush through the 20th century at the end of the school year — never even reaching the Vietnam War, he said. But today’s curriculum is more structured, and most teachers’ pace allows them to cover World War II and beyond.

Gallo teaches sophomores, juniors and seniors; most freshmen get something in class about the war, and all do as sophomores, he said.

“Even students who don’t necessarily like history tend to like World War II history,” Gallo said.

Ninth grade tends to focus on international diplomacy, while 10th graders get details of the U.S. perspective and involvement, he said.

“The kids tend to find D-Day really interesting,” Gallo said. Discussion isn’t as impressive as showing film of the actual landings, he said.

By their junior year, most students grasp the war’s significance, Gallo believes. The topic for one of his International Baccalaureate classes is 20th-century warfare, authoritarianism and the Cold War.

“And that’s their entire senior year,” Gallo said. There and in AP classes, students ask lots of questions but seem most interested in what life was like in fascist Germany and Italy, he said.

Gallo didn’t plan any special presentations on the war’s big anniversaries for this school year, but in the fall will take a student group to the United States Holocaust Museum Memorial and the World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C.

“We do that every other year,” he said.

What about college?

It’s hard to generalize what students come to college knowing about the war; some with family connections to the military know a lot, some don’t know much at all, said Daniel Magilow, associate professor of German at the University of Tennessee and faculty director of the Normandy Scholars Program.

Today’s college freshmen get much of their impression of World War II from television, the internet, even from memes — not from veterans, as previous generations did, he said.

Magilow teaches classes on how the Holocaust is remembered and discussed. Normandy Scholars is a grant-funded World War II program open to all undergraduates. In addition to a seminar, students take a study-abroad trip to London, Normandy, Paris and Amsterdam, with the help of a $3,000 scholarship.

A group is in Europe now, and since May 16 students have been blogging about their trip, including their visit to Omaha Beach.

One problem Magilow sees is that the profusion of information has made real historical scholars just “one source among many” for curious students — and other sources aren’t necessarily as reliable as specialists.

“What’s the point of having a university if we don’t have some kind of intellectual authority?” he said.

Tom Brokaw’s 1998 book “The Greatest Generation” shaped modern discussion of the war, and not entirely in a good way, Magilow said — praise for Americans, however justified, usually concealed things like pervasive racial discrimination in the U.S.

Now he teaches about those things too, but probably would have gotten resistance a few decades ago when many World War II veterans were still around, he said.

“As memory becomes more normalized, I think there’s less resistance to critical narratives about the past,” Magilow said.

Vejas Liulevicius, Lindsay Young professor of history and director of the Center for the Study of War and Society at UT, agreed that the average college freshman has a general idea of D-Day and its place in World War II, often from movies or museums.

“Then you sometimes get the student who is absolutely fascinated with the topic, sometimes due to family history,” he said via email.

A variety of courses, including foreign language classes, can fulfill UT’s “civilizations and cultures” general education requirement — thus students could get through college without hearing a word about D-Day, Liulevicius said.

But many do take classes that cover the war in detail, even if they’re not history majors, he said. Those could be general survey classes or ones focusing on World War II specifically.

The McClung Museum of Natural History & Culture on campus has a huge collection of World War II artifacts donated by veterans, while UT libraries have built up a massive collection of wartime documents, Liulevicius said.

And the Center for the Study of War and Society, which he heads, was founded to preserve as many wartime memories as possible; students in the upper-level course can work as interns recording oral histories of U.S. veterans from World War II to today, Liulevicius said.

“WWII needs to be taught in a way that does justice to the huge drama and impact of this epic event,” he said. “It needs to convey the human dimension and individual experience, not only the course of campaigns or economic mobilization.

"Teaching WWII in East Tennessee also makes it urgent to tie the dramatic events to local history, especially the vital role of Oak Ridge as a secret city in the Manhattan Project.”