For all the excellent work social historians have done the last few decades, most social studies teachers still teach top-down history. This is history as experienced by presidents, generals, business chieftains, not ordinary citizens. Wars garner lots of attention and tend to be taught as too-sterile sequences of events.

Few teachers and students purposefully and carefully examine the human costs of war and peace movements are usually ignored altogether.

Too often a hawkish teaching of war is wrapped in one dimensional patriotism that devalues the constitution and the commitments, courage, and contributions of conscientious objectors. 

Iraq and Afghanistan offer daily reminders of the human costs of war, whether it’s the loss of military and civilian lives, the ripple effects on loved ones at home, or the psychological legacy of post traumatic stress syndrome.

When I was in Victoria, B.C. last week, I read the Globe and Mail. I was riveted by a picture on the front page of Sergeant Gregory John Kruse and his 11 year old daughter, Kari, who looked a lot like my daughters at the same age. Sergeant Kruse died in Kandahar province a few days ago from an improvised explosive device. 

A week before Christmas a soldier knocked on his wife’s door bearing a gift from him. Jill, his wife, said that’s the kind of thoughtful guy he was. He’d picked out a precious stone two months earlier while he was home on leave from his mission. The paper explained, “He had arranged for a fellow soldier to pick up and deliver the rock so it would be under the tree at their home in Pembroke, Ont., on the 25th.”

“Another soldier knocked on the same family door yesterday,” the story continued, “this time bearing grim tidings that Sgt. Kruse was dead.” “It was a beautiful sapphire diamond necklace, and now I don’t want it,” Ms. Kruse said. “I want him. I just want him. I loved him so much. It seems so surreal that he’s gone.” 

More students will learn that war is incredibly destructive to both sides and represents huge failures in diplomacy when more social studies teachers incorporate the Jill and Katie Kruse’s of the world into the curriculum.