Interest by American educators in the Holocaust has increased exponentially during the second half of the twentieth century. In 1960 the Holocaust was barely being addressed in American public schools. Yet by the 1990s several states had mandated the teaching of the event. Drawing upon a variety of sources including unpublished works and interviews, this study traces the rise of genocide education in America. The author demonstrates how the genesis of this movement can be attributed to a grassroots effort initiated by several teachers, who introduced the topic as a way to help their students navigate the moral and ethical ambiguity of the times.
Few topics in modern history draw the attention that the Holocaust does. The Shoah has become synonymous with unspeakable atrocity and unbearable suffering. Yet it has also been used to teach tolerance, empathy, resistance, and hope. Understanding and Teaching the Holocaust provides a starting point for teachers in many disciplines to illuminate this crucial event in world history for students. Using a vast array of source materials—from literature and film to survivor testimonies and interviews—the contributors demonstrate how to guide students through these sensitive and painful subjects within their specific historical and social contexts. Each chapter provides pedagogical case studies for teaching content such as antisemitism, resistance and rescue, and the postwar lives of displaced persons. It will transform how students learn about the Holocaust and the circumstances surrounding it.
Teaching and learning about the Holocaust is central to school curriculums in many parts of the world. As a field for discourse and a body of practice, it is rich, multidimensional and innovative. But the history of the Holocaust is complex and challenging, and can render teaching it a complex and daunting area of work. Drawing on landmark research into teaching practices and students’ knowledge in English secondary schools, Holocaust Education: Contemporary challenges and controversies provides important knowledge about and insights into classroom teaching and learning. It sheds light on key challenges in Holocaust education, including the impact of misconceptions and misinformation, the dilemmas of using atrocity images in the classroom, and teaching in ethnically diverse environments. Overviews of the most significant debates in Holocaust education provide wider context for the classroom evidence, and contribute to a book that will act as a guide through some of the most vexed areas of Holocaust pedagogy for teachers, teacher educators, researchers and policymakers.
This original contribution to understanding the nature of Holocaust education in schools tackles an issue that has gained significant interest over the past decade, and is of increasing relevance due to a growing intolerance across Europe and elsewhere. The authors examine a range of issues including the need for Holocaust education, the factors that facilitate or inhibit its evolution, and the indifferent response of the antiracist movement to the attempted annihilation of European Jewry. The empirical content sheds light on the attitudes and practices of teachers and on the prospects of drawing on the Holocaust to further the goal of participatory democracy. The themes and illustrative research are discussed in the context of developments in two locations, the United Kingdom and Canada, and the findings will be germane to an international audience. The volume will prove invaluable to academics and policy makers concerned with social policy, sociology, education and history, as well as to teachers of the Holocaust.
Between the turn of the twentieth century and the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, the way that American schools taught about "race" changed dramatically. This transformation was engineered by the nation's most prominent anthropologists, including Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead, during World War II. Inspired by scientific racism in Nazi Germany, these activist scholars decided that the best way to fight racial prejudice was to teach what they saw as the truth about race in the institution that had the power to do the most good-American schools. Anthropologists created lesson plans, lectures, courses, and pamphlets designed to revise what they called "the 'race' concept" in American education. They believed that if teachers presented race in scientific and egalitarian terms, conveying human diversity as learned habits of culture rather than innate characteristics, American citizens would become less racist. Although nearly forgotten today, this educational reform movement represents an important component of early civil rights activism that emerged alongside the domestic and global tensions of wartime.Drawing on hundreds of first-hand accounts written by teachers nationwide, Zoe Burkholder traces the influence of this anthropological activism on the way that teachers understood, spoke, and taught about race. She explains how and why teachers readily understood certain theoretical concepts, such as the division of race into three main categories, while they struggled to make sense of more complex models of cultural diversity and structural inequality. As they translated theories into practice, teachers crafted an educational discourse on race that differed significantly from the definition of race produced by scientists at mid-century.Schoolteachers and their approach to race were put into the spotlight with the Brown v. Board of Education case, but the belief that racially integrated schools would eradicate racism in the next generation and eliminate the need for discussion of racial inequality long predated this. Discussions of race in the classroom were silenced during the early Cold War until a new generation of antiracist, "multicultural" educators emerged in the 1970s.
This volume represents the most comprehensive collection ever produced of empirical research on Holocaust education around the world. It comes at a critical time, as the world observes the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. We are now at a turning point, as the generations that witnessed and survived the Shoah are slowly passing on. Governments are charged with ensuring that this defining event of the 20th century takes its rightful place in the schooling and the historical consciousness of their peoples. The policies and practices of Holocaust education around the world are as diverse as the countries that grapple with its history and its meaning. Educators around the globe struggle to reconcile national histories and memories with the international realities of the Holocaust and its implications for the present. These efforts take place at a time when scholarship about the Holocaust itself has made great strides. In this book, these issues are framed by some of the leading voices in the field, including Elie Wiesel and Yehuda Bauer, and then explored by many distinguished scholars who represent a wide range of expertise. Holocaust education is of such significance, so rich in meaning, so powerful in content, and so diverse in practice that the need for extensive, high-quality empirical research is critical. Th is book provides exactly that.
How do schools worldwide treat the Holocaust as a subject? In which countries does the Holocaust form part of classroom teaching? Are representations of the Holocaust always accurate, balanced and unprejudiced in curricula and textbooks? This study, carried out by UNESCO and the Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research, compares for the first time representations of the Holocaust in school textbooks and national curricula. Drawing on data which includes countries in which there exists no or little information about representations of the Holocaust, the study shows where the Holocaust is established in official guidelines, and contains a close textbook study, focusing on the comprehensiveness and accuracy of representations and historical narratives. The book highlights evolving practices worldwide and thus provides education stakeholders with comprehensive documentation about current trends in curricula directives and textbook representations of the Holocaust. It further formulates recommendations that will help policy-makers provide the educational means by which pupils may develop Holocaust literacy.
"International interest in Holocaust education has reached new heights in recent years. This historic event has long been central to cultures of remembrance in those countries where the genocide of the Jewish people occurred. But other parts of the world have now begun to recognize the history of the Holocaust as an effective means to teach about mass violence and to promote human rights and civic duty, testifying to the emergence of this pivotal historical event as a universal frame of reference. In this new, globalized context, how is the Holocaust represented and taught? How do teachers handle this excessively complex and emotionally loaded subject in fast-changing multicultural European societies still haunted by the crimes perpetrated by the Nazis and their collaborators? Why and how is it taught in other areas of the world that have only little if any connection with the history of the Jewish people? Holocaust Education in a Global Context will explore these questions."--page 10.
Holocaust Education: Promise, Practice, Power and Potential provides timely studies of some of the most pressing issues in teaching and learning about the Holocaust around the world. Europe is experiencing both anti-Semitic attacks, many by radicals claiming the banner of Islam, and the resurgence of right wing movements that are openly hostile to minority rights, particularly for marginalized and vulnerable groups like the Roma/Sinti, and Muslim refugees. Can Holocaust education, an encounter with the most extreme racial ideology to afflict the continent, reduce violence and prejudice against Jewish and other minority groups? The important studies in this volume address these and other pressing issues for the field, including the progress of Central and Eastern European countries that experienced both Soviet hegemony and Nazi terror in grappling with the history of the Holocaust. This book was originally published as a special issue of Intercultural Education.
