War & Peace Quote by Marvin Olasky

The line smuggles a curriculum into a vacation plan, and it does so with the breezy authority of a parent-to-parent tip. By opening on “officially summer,” Olasky leans into the season’s cultural script: school is out, learning is optional, everyone’s attention span is heat-softened. Then he flips the script with a proposition that sounds almost too practical to argue with: if you’re serious about educating your kids and yourself, take the family to Civil War battlefields.

The intent is plainly pedagogical, but the subtext is a critique of how Americans treat history - as either a textbook chore or a political cudgel. Battlefields promise something more stubborn: place-based memory that refuses to stay abstract. You can’t easily reduce Antietam or Gettysburg to a single talking point when the terrain itself keeps insisting on logistics, scale, and consequence. The “learn something themselves” clause is the tell; Olasky isn’t only addressing children’s enrichment, he’s indicting adult complacency and the fantasy that civic literacy can be outsourced to schools.

Context matters, too. For an educator writing in a culture war era where the Civil War is perpetually re-litigated - over monuments, curricula, and the meaning of “heritage” - the battlefield becomes a strategic alternative classroom. It offers controlled exposure to national trauma without the mediation of a feed or a pundit. It’s also a subtle bid for humility: go where the evidence is, walk it, and let the country’s most unresolved argument teach you back.