Holocaust education requires more than noble mandates

On Jan. 27 each year, the world pauses to remember the six million Jewish people who were murdered in the Holocaust. Moments of silence are held, candles are lit and politicians vow to “never forget.” These acts of memorialization might briefly honor the past and raise awareness. But what good are they without action?

Given the unprecedented surge in antisemitism across the United States, the need for action is greater than ever — and we can start by improving Holocaust education. Most states don’t even require it. From Idaho to Vermont and over two dozen states in between, American kids can finish school without having learned anything about the Holocaust.

Even in states where Holocaust education is mandated, the mandate usually just requires that it be taught. It doesn’t say what should be taught, or how many lessons it should take. It doesn’t say what the outcomes should be, or how they should be assessed. Too many mandates are noble in principle, but ineffective in practice.

One case in point: New York’s politicians recently found their own mandate to be so ineffective, they passed a second mandate to investigate it.

The subject itself is part of the problem. Requiring social sciences teachers to “just teach” the Holocaust is like requiring math teachers to “just teach” quantum mechanics: it isn’t that simple. For starters, there’s an ocean of classroom materials available about the Holocaust, and the quality of those materials varies enormously. Once they decide what to use, teachers must find a way to present it that won’t traumatize the kids.

It doesn’t get any easier from there. Most of the Holocaust happened in two short years between 1942 and 1944, but it’s a massive subject. Its origins go back to at least the mid-19th century, and arguably hundreds of years earlier, to the Judeophobia that blighted medieval Europe. It was deregulated and decentralized, so much so that it makes sense to see it as a cluster of connected genocides rather than a single event.

And we’re still gathering evidence about it, and we’re still hunting perpetrators, even now. In 2020, previously unseen photographs of the Sobibor extermination camp were discovered, giving us fresh insight into what happened there. Last year, a 101-year-old man was sentenced for the crimes he committed as a teenager in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Holocaust curricula must be constantly updated to stay on top of such developments.

All this constitutes an impossible burden for teachers, who are already burning out in record numbers. Little wonder that Holocaust education often collapses into tick-off-the-box exercises, in which kids read a book like “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” or watch a movie like “Schindler’s List.” This might make them aware of the Holocaust, but it doesn’t teach them about it — any more than watching “Jaws” would teach them about marine biology.

Unique and important lessons

Some might wonder if we shouldn’t just give up on teaching the Holocaust. Why, after all, do kids need to learn about something that happened on another continent nearly a century ago?

My answer is that the Holocaust is unique, and that it offers uniquely important lessons because of it. True, it isn’t the only genocide. But it remains the only one that came about from a government using racist pseudoscience to sentence an entire people to death in a state-sponsored extermination program. It’s also the only one that targeted men, women and children on a global scale. The Nazis aspired to kill all Jews everywhere, not just in Germany or Europe. Consequently, the Holocaust invites questions about the nature of civilization, and about complicity and culpability, in a way that no other historical event does. It poses the single greatest challenge to our understanding of what it means to be human.

So, this International Holocaust Remembrance Day, as well as memorializing, let’s call for action. Let’s call for every state in the union to mandate Holocaust education, and for every mandate to give teachers the support that they need and the respect that they deserve. And let’ s remember that we cannot afford to be indifferent to the hatred that’s blighting American life. As the great historian Sir Ian Kershaw said, “The road to Auschwitz was built by hate, but paved with indifference.”

Luke Berryman is the founder of The Ninth Candle, a Chicago-based nonprofit organization that works with schools across the country to improve standards in Holocaust education.

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