The rise of Hitler isn't really military history. Same with Caesar. Yes, they were soldiers and yes they started and fought in wars, but the politics and background that gave them the positions of absolute authority, the parallels you can draw between both men in their rise and demise, that is what you should have been taught.
And I beg to differ. Absolutely nothing has shaped human history like human conflict. For a start, the winners of your conflicts write the history that comes after it.
And you can take any single invention and innovation, thought, building, art or service (aside from religion, and even then it's still close and involves conflict itself), take its impact upon the globe, then watch it pale in comparison to the outcome of a large conflict.
What is the internet compared to if the Whites had won the Russian Revolution? What is the jet engine or the coliseum or the Sistine chapel to if Germany had somehow won WWII? You want to talk about the great Greek thinkers? What are they compared to what if the Persians had been victorious at Marathon or Platea?
And you can boil these down to individual moments, battles. If Patton (or someone as headstrong and loose as him) had been in the Wermarcht during Barbarossa, Germany would've won WWII. It was only because of Hitlers orders and his generals following those orders, was Moscow not taken and Stalin captured/killed, ending the Eastern Front by 1942. If Gavrilo Princip had missed 106 years and 2 days ago, the world would be a far different place than if the car hadn't been invented. Leonidas ignoring the Karneia festival that'd kept Sparta out of the Battle of Marathon and marching his bodyguard to Thermopylae (along with several thousand other greeks he'd 'persuaded' along the way) changed the face and fate of the world far more than gothic arches ever will.
Hell, even an invention as important as the wheel, or discovering fire, line that up to humans figuring out that flint actually gets pretty sharp and is surprisingly better than teeth at killing another human so you can steal his wheel.
All school is 'forced teaching'. You are forced to learn under threat of punishment or shame, be that if you're learning Pythagoras or D-Day. The difference between education and 'de-education' is delivery and attitude, not the subject being taught. One of the best lessons I've ever had was a subject as dry as the kinds of improvised explosive devices you'd find in Afghanistan. It wasn't changing the world. It wasn't even new information (I'd been there a few times), but I was riveted from start to finish because it was interesting, well taught, funny and the guy was utterly peerless in his subject matter knowledge.
It's not always nonsense. Granted, in some wars, the 'good guys' is a matter of perspective and usually is decided by the winning team. WWI is an example of this. Neither side were bad, the war was pointless in its entirety, the loss of life was unrivalled and Germany only became the bad guys because they lost. This is why WWI must be taught. Because unless you educate people on the reasons why it started in the first place, people will not understand how it happened and not recognise the signs of it happening again.
But can you honestly sit there and hand on heart say WWII was ambiguous, either side could have been the good/bad guys and the narrative of good (allies) overcoming evil (axis) is twisted facts? Again, granted there was some twisted deals going on in the background, but that doesn't push the US into being the bad guys or Japan into the plucky underdog.
And therein lies your problem. Truth and facts are not the same same thing. Objectivity is objective. As soon as it stops becoming fact and starts becoming truth, it becomes opinion and is thus subjective. Even if it isn't bullshit. Pursue facts, not truth.
And not just wars and battles, but also any sports that involve teams or scores and any game where you have an opponent. Naughts and crosses is conflict of rival powers for control. But no, you can add objective, factual reasons for starting a conflict.
Xerxes invaded Greece because he was a rival power seeking to control that state. He also wanted to burn Athens to the ground for humiliating his father at Marathon. That isn't opinion or subjective, it's a fact. And he did it as well.
It didn't go that far. 50 years after the cultural explosion in Greece which founded much of what you speak of, Athens and Sparta were right back where they were before the Persians invaded, kicking fuck out of each other and everyone around them in the Peloponnesian Wars. This era was so 'enlightened', it executed Socrates by getting him to poison himself.
Those changes never made the vehicles simpler. The other issue was many parts where hand made by craftsmen, meaning they only fitted one specific vehicle instead of an entire vehicle type. It meant you couldn't even cannabilise some parts as what fitted one Tiger, may not fit another Tiger of even the same version
The USSR had a long production run with limited models simply because they forbade improving the T-34. Not because they wanted to keep making the same version, but because the only alterations allowed were ones that made it either cheaper or quicker to manufacture which actually made the vehicles worse as quality control plummeted. The first actual upgrade of the T-34, was the -85.
And America is a really bad example of 'limited models'. Do you have any idea how many major variations of Sherman there are?! And I'm taking major changes like suspension, engines, guns, armour, turret. That's not including all the funnies and the minor modifications. The Sherman was constantly and extensively modified throughout the war to keep pace with what was happening on the battlefield.
Something the US had the luxury of since they could design, build and test things with the safety of an entire ocean between them and the enemy. Where as:
Zee Germans were having to test their vehicles in combat and make changes from reports from the front, resulting in modifications and upgrades like with the drivetrain on the Panther.
These are gun changes. Usually because (again) what they are trying has never been done before and the only way to test a Sturmtiger was to drive one to Warsaw and blow up a building with it to see how it performs. They then modify the weapons rather than leaving them at a sub-standard level.
Or
this became a thing, which is how vehicles like Jagdtiger ended up leaving factories with the wrong guns installed, simply because they didn't have any of the right guns left but they needed the tanks now to defend Berlin. As I said, the only reason this constant changing, modification and refining was an issue (and the only reasons the Germans were doing it), was because the Germans didn't have the resources and freedom to extensively test a concept out before production like the US could. Swap places with the US, and such actions would be applauded (like they are on Sherman) for the attempt to keep their equipment at the tip of line in capability vs their opponents.
I dunno, I'm not so sure the war would've been the same if the germans had made 12,000 Tiger I rather than 1247 of them. And you can insert any german AFV into that from the StuG to the Tiger II.
Mania. Hitlers mania. They could have won regardless of his genocidal thinking, promising to help the Italians / Japanese and whatever. What lost the Germans the war was Hitler taking control of the Army at a tactical and strategic level and making some really stupid decisions, especially on the Eastern Front.
And I beg to differ. Absolutely nothing has shaped human history like human conflict. For a start, the winners of your conflicts write the history that comes after it.
And you can take any single invention and innovation, thought, building, art or service (aside from religion, and even then it's still close and involves conflict itself), take its impact upon the globe, then watch it pale in comparison to the outcome of a large conflict.
What is the internet compared to if the Whites had won the Russian Revolution? What is the jet engine or the coliseum or the Sistine chapel to if Germany had somehow won WWII? You want to talk about the great Greek thinkers? What are they compared to what if the Persians had been victorious at Marathon or Platea?
And you can boil these down to individual moments, battles. If Patton (or someone as headstrong and loose as him) had been in the Wermarcht during Barbarossa, Germany would've won WWII. It was only because of Hitlers orders and his generals following those orders, was Moscow not taken and Stalin captured/killed, ending the Eastern Front by 1942. If Gavrilo Princip had missed 106 years and 2 days ago, the world would be a far different place than if the car hadn't been invented. Leonidas ignoring the Karneia festival that'd kept Sparta out of the Battle of Marathon and marching his bodyguard to Thermopylae (along with several thousand other greeks he'd 'persuaded' along the way) changed the face and fate of the world far more than gothic arches ever will.
Hell, even an invention as important as the wheel, or discovering fire, line that up to humans figuring out that flint actually gets pretty sharp and is surprisingly better than teeth at killing another human so you can steal his wheel.
All school is 'forced teaching'. You are forced to learn under threat of punishment or shame, be that if you're learning Pythagoras or D-Day. The difference between education and 'de-education' is delivery and attitude, not the subject being taught. One of the best lessons I've ever had was a subject as dry as the kinds of improvised explosive devices you'd find in Afghanistan. It wasn't changing the world. It wasn't even new information (I'd been there a few times), but I was riveted from start to finish because it was interesting, well taught, funny and the guy was utterly peerless in his subject matter knowledge.
It's not always nonsense. Granted, in some wars, the 'good guys' is a matter of perspective and usually is decided by the winning team. WWI is an example of this. Neither side were bad, the war was pointless in its entirety, the loss of life was unrivalled and Germany only became the bad guys because they lost. This is why WWI must be taught. Because unless you educate people on the reasons why it started in the first place, people will not understand how it happened and not recognise the signs of it happening again.
But can you honestly sit there and hand on heart say WWII was ambiguous, either side could have been the good/bad guys and the narrative of good (allies) overcoming evil (axis) is twisted facts? Again, granted there was some twisted deals going on in the background, but that doesn't push the US into being the bad guys or Japan into the plucky underdog.
And therein lies your problem. Truth and facts are not the same same thing. Objectivity is objective. As soon as it stops becoming fact and starts becoming truth, it becomes opinion and is thus subjective. Even if it isn't bullshit. Pursue facts, not truth.
And not just wars and battles, but also any sports that involve teams or scores and any game where you have an opponent. Naughts and crosses is conflict of rival powers for control. But no, you can add objective, factual reasons for starting a conflict.
Xerxes invaded Greece because he was a rival power seeking to control that state. He also wanted to burn Athens to the ground for humiliating his father at Marathon. That isn't opinion or subjective, it's a fact. And he did it as well.
It didn't go that far. 50 years after the cultural explosion in Greece which founded much of what you speak of, Athens and Sparta were right back where they were before the Persians invaded, kicking fuck out of each other and everyone around them in the Peloponnesian Wars. This era was so 'enlightened', it executed Socrates by getting him to poison himself.
Those changes never made the vehicles simpler. The other issue was many parts where hand made by craftsmen, meaning they only fitted one specific vehicle instead of an entire vehicle type. It meant you couldn't even cannabilise some parts as what fitted one Tiger, may not fit another Tiger of even the same version
The USSR had a long production run with limited models simply because they forbade improving the T-34. Not because they wanted to keep making the same version, but because the only alterations allowed were ones that made it either cheaper or quicker to manufacture which actually made the vehicles worse as quality control plummeted. The first actual upgrade of the T-34, was the -85.
And America is a really bad example of 'limited models'. Do you have any idea how many major variations of Sherman there are?! And I'm taking major changes like suspension, engines, guns, armour, turret. That's not including all the funnies and the minor modifications. The Sherman was constantly and extensively modified throughout the war to keep pace with what was happening on the battlefield.
Something the US had the luxury of since they could design, build and test things with the safety of an entire ocean between them and the enemy. Where as:
Zee Germans were having to test their vehicles in combat and make changes from reports from the front, resulting in modifications and upgrades like with the drivetrain on the Panther.
These are gun changes. Usually because (again) what they are trying has never been done before and the only way to test a Sturmtiger was to drive one to Warsaw and blow up a building with it to see how it performs. They then modify the weapons rather than leaving them at a sub-standard level.
Or
this became a thing, which is how vehicles like Jagdtiger ended up leaving factories with the wrong guns installed, simply because they didn't have any of the right guns left but they needed the tanks now to defend Berlin. As I said, the only reason this constant changing, modification and refining was an issue (and the only reasons the Germans were doing it), was because the Germans didn't have the resources and freedom to extensively test a concept out before production like the US could. Swap places with the US, and such actions would be applauded (like they are on Sherman) for the attempt to keep their equipment at the tip of line in capability vs their opponents.
I dunno, I'm not so sure the war would've been the same if the germans had made 12,000 Tiger I rather than 1247 of them. And you can insert any german AFV into that from the StuG to the Tiger II.
Mania. Hitlers mania. They could have won regardless of his genocidal thinking, promising to help the Italians / Japanese and whatever. What lost the Germans the war was Hitler taking control of the Army at a tactical and strategic level and making some really stupid decisions, especially on the Eastern Front.