In paperback with illustrations, this is the young adult edition of Howard Zinn’s classic telling of American history. A Young People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn with Rebecca Stefoff brings to U.S. history the viewpoints of workers, people who are enslaved, immigrants, women, Native Americans, and others whose stories, and their impact, are rarely included in books for young people.

War Resisters League has put together a workshop for high school students to learn about the all-consuming war machine which dominates our economy. The workshop curriculum uses hands-on techniques, readings and discussions to build student awareness of the issue. Starting with a breakdown of the federal budget, the curriculum goes on to analyze war profiteers who benefit from the continuation of global conflict to the justifications for the occupation and war in Afghanistan. Students can gain a concrete understanding of priorities through exercises like allocating pennies into labeled jars proportional to our annual federal budget.

Also Listen to   Radio Segment with Ali Issa, national field organizer for the War Resister’s League about this curriculum for students.

Camouflaged: Investigating How the U.S. Military Affects You and Your Community is a tool for educators to help middle and high school-aged students explore the role of the military in their lives and in their communities. Local New York City teachers, led by the New York Collective of Radical Educators (NYCoRE), generated the Camouflaged curriculum with the intent of making it accessible to educators across the country in a variety of settings and curricular areas. NYCoRE believes that it is the role of educators as allies to young people to ensure that students have information from a variety of sources before considering enlisting in the armed forces. At this point in U.S. history, military recruiters have unprecedented access to young people in and out of school through a variety of mediums. This curriculum provides a critical lens to help students navigate recruiters’ messages and to examine the role of the military throughout this country’s history to the present.

Source: NYCore: New York Collective of Radical Educators

Power Point Slide show about realities of military enlistment as a counter-recruitment tool. Ready to play without opening Power Point in editing mode.

Source: Veterans for Peace: Chicago-area group

“What Young People Should Know Before Joining the Military” is a unit designed for a 10th grade US History class. The historical component revolves around imperialism and the Spanish-American War. A contemporary connection is made through a look at imperialism and the Iraq War. The final project for the unit consists of group presentations on what CPS students should know about the military before they consider joining. The presentations were videotaped and then edited and compiled to make a 15-minute video that was posted on YouTube.

Our federal budget is more than numbers on a page. Congresswoman Barbara Lee has called it a “moral document,” a representation of our nation's values. The If I Had a Trillion Dollars youth video contest asks young people from across the country, to tell us about what they value. It asks them to tell us what they would do with $1 trillion – for themselves, their families and for their communities.

This Curriculum Guide is meant to provide a context for young people creating videos for the contest. Through group activities, journaling and facilitated discussion, youth will gain an understanding of how our federal budget works, what our nations priorities are in terms of budgeting and they will begin to explore their own personal budget priorities.

Download, read, and distribute
the National Call to respond to
increasing military, corporate
and conservative influence in
our public school

We use variations of these exercises in our peaceCENTER training, If you are using peaceCENTER material in your classroom, we would be delighted to add your lesson plans to the list. You can e-mail them to the This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Revised 10/13/2017

Planning to Change the World: A Plan Book for Social Justice Teachers 2020-2021 is a plan book for educators who believe their students can and will change the world. It is designed to help teachers translate their vision of a just education into concrete classroom activities.

Source: NYCore: New York Collective of Radical Educators

Selene Rivas presents a series of brief articles exploring how the U.S. citizenry has been normalized to accept a permanent state of militarism through popular culture: Movies, video games and comic books.

"Over the course of this series, we have explored several concepts which are building blocks for the social sciences (“normal”, “normalization”), which in turn have helped us understand and define “militarism” and “militarization”. After this, we dove into the transformative potential found within popular culture: how can it affect the people who consume it? "

Selene Rivas

Teaching About the Wars breaks the curricular silence on the U.S. military engagement in Afghanistan and the Middle East. Even though the United States has been at war continuously since just after 9/11, sometimes it seems that our schools have forgotten. This collection of insightful articles and hands-on lessons shows that teachers have found ways to prompt their students to think critically about big issues. Here is the best writing fromRethinking Schools magazine on war and peace in the 21st century.

Teaching About the Wars is divided into five chapters:

1. Introduction: Breaking the Silence on War
2. The Road to War
3. The Human Face of War
4. Military Recruitment
5. Anti-War Resistance

Contributing authors include Bill Bigelow, Ann Pelo, Margot Pepper, Bob Peterson, Özlem Sensoy, and Howard Zinn

The Class of Nonviolence is an eight session class developed by Colman McCarthy, founder of the Center for Teaching Peace in Washington, D.C. It uses classics in peace and justice literature to teach peacemaking. This course can change your life and you can change the world.

The entire eight-session / 48 essay class can be downloaded as a PDF file - it's free!

If you have suggestions or questions, e-mail This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Power Point presentation about the truth of military recruitment information and the realities of military service and veteran services from Rogue Valley Peace Veterans.

This series of lessons explores possible disparities between the general population and the military, especially among military recruits. Students compare data and statistics on both populations and use various algebraic and statistical methods to compare the two groups.
Resource Type: Curriculum

Source: Radical Math