Science fiction as...History?

I think it would be difficult, but pretty good if done well. I've seen things like this on a smaller scale (such as classes taking up a chapter in a book, etc.)

Wahoo! A future history. Robert Heinlein did something along that vein. He went with a utopian ideal though, and wrote a series of stories about how humanity acheived its highest potential and spread out among the stars and what not. It's been done, and I'm sure you're going to do a splendid job with your idea. Best of luck!

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Framing devices are a commonly used literary technique, but - really how interesting can you make sitting in a classroom getting a history lesson? (although after an apocolypse and another 60 years, education systems may be MUCH different than I am picturing!)

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Well my story is sci fi, but the main character is an archaeologist who's looking into the Cold War and a later series of wars between the EU and the Americans over who owns the moon's resources. It seems like a good way of explaining it to me, although I think I'd go for extracts from a textbook rather than a history class--it would mean you don't have to create a set of characters to be the 'class' and would let you go for a more straightforward approach. You could even put little extracts at the start of each chapter as a sort of intro to the events within the chapter.

Hope that helps :D

NutmegAngel
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Nutmeg's idea is a good one. I'm using frequent flashbacks in my novel, and it's not always easy to keep things flowing the way I want. But the way my plot is constructed gives me no better choice. Using excerpts from a history book would be much clearer for the readers and much easier to manipulate if you find you need to go back and change something.

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I agree Heinlein did a great job dealing with future histories.

There are a few things I think you need to think about when dealing anything post apocalyptic. The name implies major destruction, but that can be problematic. You really need to think about the kind of destruction you are going to do right up front. Too much destruction and there won't be history classes 65 years in the future, you will still be trying to pick up the pieces and put them back together. It wouldn't take much destruction to reduce us the level of a central african conflict country when it comes to infrastructure, education, culture, and government. Not enough destruction and you won't have a story because the war is a non issue.

Normally in sci-fi I say you can figure out the details later, but in this case, I think you need to come up with all the details upfront before you begin writing to get a decent flowing story. My suggestion is to forget about the flash forward or other plot devices and write the war from a first person point of view to get the details down. If that isn't the story you want to tell, you can then add the other things and base the rewrite on his story.

I really think I'd groan a bit if the characters in the flash-forward scenes were just there as a plot device. Unless they do something, and are actually connected to the story, then they're superfluous and the story will be better without them.

There's no reason you couldn't write the story from that perspective, mind you, presenting it as a historical account, and maybe even include an epilogue after the fact to explain that it's being taught in a future classroom, but making it integral to the narrative sounds like a bad idea to me.

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I suggest skipping the history class and going straight to the history book. This means you'll have to either paint the characters with a broad brush (Churchill, Yao Ping, etc.) or include selections of personal writing. If you want the class element, you could introduce each chapter with something from the readers. Ender's Game did something like that, to give an out-of-Ender structure. The people in charge of training him would talk about larger problems and issues, so the author didn't have to cram it into Ender's life.

If you're supposed to "write what you know," how does science-fiction or fantasy get written?

I'm finding myself doing something similar to this with chapter openings that are quotations from future histories, memoirs, and the like, which fill in some gaps in the history (when you're writing a story set in the very end of the 77th century AD, you need to fill in gaps like that).

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I'm writing a memoir of a character in the future. I'm not sure if it will be readable, but so far it's been writable. My challenge has been to make the characters more important than the world. It's easy to be too self-indulgent in the history sections. It sounds like you have a better handle on it. Good luck!