The Department of Defense Education Activity operates about 160 schools across 11 countries and educates roughly 70,000 students who are children of active-duty military or civilian service members.
The Western civilization course planned for this fall will use a textbook published by Encounter Books, a conservative publishing house. Titled "The Golden Thread: A History of the Western Tradition, Volume I: The Ancient World and Christendom," it includes suggested lesson plans created in partnership with Hillsdale College, a conservative Christian school in Michigan that has also developed influential materials for K-12 schools.
The course is part of a wider reshaping of the Defense Department's schools. They have begun hiring classical learning teachers, and the department has brought in new academic chiefs with ties to classical learning charter schools and to Republican-led efforts to promote more patriotic education.
Classical education broadly refers to a teaching style built on the liberal arts, with an emphasis on critical thinking and citizenship.
In the Pentagon's system, high school students can take the new course, Western Civilization to 1500, to fulfill a world history graduation requirement, according to a news release. The course is offered through the department's virtual school.
In the textbook’s introduction, the authors write: “The dangers presented by the neglect of Western history are not trivial.”
“When citizens of Western countries are utterly ignorant of history, as most now are, they are left unarmed against the general hostility to their own tradition that has become so destructive a force in contemporary culture,” they write.
The textbook's authors credit early Christianity with promoting the idea that all people must be treated humanely. It argues that “Christian faith also supported a humane cosmopolitanism."
The book describes Islam as inherently more violent than Christianity. In a chapter on the Middle Ages, the text describes Arabs as resentful or bitter toward Christians and Jews.
