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The most common argument against teaching the Holocaust is that students are too immature to handle such depressing subject matter. How can they be deemed too immature to explore the implications of the Holocaust when their own experiences involve losing friends to drive-by shootings, drugs, or suicide, and world news confronts them with apathetic responses to ethnic cleansing, starvation, and fundamentalist terrorism?
Another argument is that the Holocaust only deals with Jews, so it does not apply to the majority of students. These misconceptions deprive students of an integral Holocaust lesson, the means to understand the treatment of minorities in an historic context. Studying the persecution of Jews and that of other minorities during the Holocaust promotes in students a more positive attitude toward cultures unlike their own.
How can we not teach it?
Holocaust education engages students in critical thinking and self-reflection, by which they can make essential connections between history and the contemporary moral choices they confront in their own lives. Education is the process of discovery. Students who are immersed in a highly advanced age of technology discover that pure rationality and scientific approaches to problems can produce destructive as well as beneficial consequences. During the Holocaust religious, moral, and legal systems failed in deterring the dangers of prejudice, apathy, and indifference. These same dangers are present today, with television programs such as Race and Reason and the promotion of nationalism by different governments.
By studying the Holocaust, students learn to challenge preconceptions and understand the complex relationship between individual identity and universal identity.
Holocaust education provides a pathway for students to confront their present concerns involving loyalty, peer pressure, scapegoating, labeling, conformity, and belonging. By studying the past to understand the present, they learn that human beings possess the power to control their behavior by thought, so they become aware of the importance of making choices and come to realize that one person can make a difference. Abolishing the civil rights of one group can lead to the abolition of those rights for all, so each person must take a stand against evil or eventually risk forfeiting all individual freedom.
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