Schools are dropping the Holocaust from history lessons to avoid offending Muslim pupils...

George Santayana is spinning in his grave.

I don't know whether to cry or scream.

'A DfES spokesman said: "It's up to schools to make a judgment on non-compulsory parts of the national curriculum. It is a broad framework and there is scope for schools to make their own decisions."

Teaching of the Holocaust is expected to become compulsory under the new national curriculum from next year.' www.guardian.co.uk

In future, it seems, they'll have to teach it.

The story says, "some teachers are reluctant to cover the atrocity for fear of upsetting students whose beliefs include Holocaust denial."

Next: Some teachers are reluctant to teach addition for fear of upsetting students whose beliefs include 2+2=5.

quote:

Originally posted by Professor:
The story says, "some teachers are reluctant to cover the atrocity for fear of upsetting students whose beliefs include Holocaust denial."

I thought it was, "Those who fail to learn from the past are destined to repeat it." by Sir Walter Scott.

"Beliefs" fall under the subject of religion. Religion has no place in the schools, nor was it permitted, last I checked. History is History. And, regardless of religious beliefs, the academic curriculum must be taught to our children, including History; if we have any hopes of teaching them the invaluable lessons which it provides.

This is like getting bent out of shape for teaching science, biology, or evolution.

Parents, teach your kids what you want them believing religiously at Home or at Sunday School. Allow the schools to teach them what they know. And, somewhere in the middle, maybe they'll end up with an informed belief system of their own.

quote:

Originally posted by Valor D:
I thought it was, "Those who fail to learn from the past are destined to repeat it." by Sir Walter Scott.

Apparently George Santayana failed to learn of Sir Walter Scott's quote and so he repeated it.

There are two worrying things here - not that some schools are not choosing the Holocaust as an option, but the report that one (at least) is making that decision for utterly inappropriate reasons.

The other is that there are people out there telling their kids that the Holocaust never happened. That's horrible.

More on the report:

'The report called for resources, which were scarce at present, to be made available to teach controversial and emotional history subjects.

Initial teacher training should include more attention on how to teach these subjects and a better research base should be made available to teachers, it said.' bbc.co.uk

Actually, it seems that, in North America, teaching the Holocaust as a topic - rather than as something to be mentioned in passing as part of WWII - is fairly new:

'The teaching of the Holocaust as a subject in the public school curriculum is a relatively recent development. As described by Carole Ann Reed and Geoffrey Short in their forthcoming book, Issues in Holocaust Education, Holocaust consciousness in North America began in the late 1960s and some individuals were doing occasional courses at the university level. The publication of a number of scholarly books and memoirs helped to begin a significant body of literary work about the Holocaust and focused attention on the Holocaust "as a concept." In the 1970s media study guides and other educational materials accompanied productions; the Holocaust, as a distinct concept, became part of North American popular culture.

Throughout the 1970s, the Holocaust was a focus of discussion in the academic community in both Canada and the United States. Courses on the Holocaust resulted from the motivation of individual teachers and professors rather than the university, community or departmental policy. The first teachers’ conference on "Teaching the Holocaust" was held in the United States in part as a result of survivors and survivor organizations that began to play a role in founding museums and teaching centres. Teacher training programs started in the United States in the 1980s...' Holocaust Education in Canada

Learning about history also includes learning about the sources from which we learn. It is hard for me to understand why there is so much focus on making sure the history diet of high school kids is perfectly balanced and not biased. The learning of history isn't just a list of events to understand but a manner of learning about the past that should grow after the class is over.

All these people that are protesting this or that being taught in classrooms don't really get it. What is being taught is how to learn. If a person leaves school with all that they will ever learn in their life then they haven't been properly educated.

When people let their beliefs take precedence over learning, then they truly are a danger.

a bit further:

I am interested in what others believe. I will read what Holocaust deniers think and learn why they think these things. Does that make me a Holocaust denier? Does it threaten my belief that the Holocaust as documented is fact and not a creation of politics to read and learn why others don't think so?

Same thing with Intelligent Design - I will read about it because I find these kind of things interesting. It doesn't mean that I believe. The problem is that these two things, ID and Holocaust denial aren't really Science or History so you'd have to teach them in a Modern Thinking course or some sort of Social Studies course.

quote:

The learning of history isn't just a list of events to understand but a manner of learning about the past that should grow after the class is over.

That's an excellent point. Armed with the correct skills, high school graduates should be able to work out for themselves what happened during the Holocaust.

The show 7th heaven covered 'Holocaust denial' in its second season episode "I Hate You".

Sounds as though some teachers have misunderstood the guidelines (and their duty). They are more concerned about disruption in the classroom than anything else.

Schools that don't teach the syllabus (the National Curriculum ) in full, or correctly, will not be passed by the government's School Inspectors

It's not a matter of teaching that the holocaust never happened. Or, to rephrase, it's not a question of denying that the Nazis killed many millions they perceived as 'undesirables', and that the largest segment of these were Jews.

It's a question of the propaganda use to which this horror has been put for the past sixty years.

If we look at a history of 'the holocaust' in film, we see that literally hundreds of films have been made, showing the victimization of Jews. (Go ahead, google it). To my knowledge, only one film was made to show the victimization of Palestinians; and that was made by Vanessa Redgrave.

Ironically, she won an academy award for playing a Jewish heroine of the struggle against Nazism in the film "Julia". But she had learned some facts about the situation in the Middle East, and had made a low-budget film called "The Palestinians" which depicted the plight of the people who had been displaced to create "Liebenstraum", or living room for the new state of Israel after World War II.

Barraged by television programs and movies about the horrors of the treatment of Jews by the Nazis, when the old Balfour promise (dating from a deal the British had made with the Zionists during World War I, upon which the British later reneged) the public seemed to see nothing unjust about taking the land of the Palestinians away from them in order to create a homeland for the world's Zionists.

So when Redgrave dared to suggest there was a Palestinian point of view, it marked virtually the end of her career. She was vilified, boycotted, called a Nazi and an anti-Semite (though the Palestinians are also Semites). Eventually she lived it down.

But it's not about her. It's about realpolitik, , and how public opinion is formed by bathos and covert censorship, which makes a mockery of the notion of democracy.

So, though I don't believe in censorship of world news, still, when one side in a dispute is given preferential and sympathetic -- even exclusive -- coverage for fifty plus years, and when presentation of the other side is so uniformly rejected, thanks in large part to the former's excellent spin-management:

- The U.S. and Britain and to some extent France knew the importance of the Middle East, and knew that creation of the new state of Israel was an unprecedented 'rationale' for their presence there,

- they had little other cause to intrude themselves there; their intrusion created a risk of nuclear confrontation with the Soviet union during the early Cold War years;

- still, they were continuing World War II, in a way; they would right the wrongs done to the Jews (that it was not at the expense of the Germans and their allies who had started the war, and had run the extermination camps, but at the expense of the Palestinians, was easily overlooked amid the sentimental bathos of Hollywood propaganda)

then I think that it is about time we at the very least stopped glorifying one element in the struggle, and giving a special, almost a sacred, status.

quote:

Originally posted by babthrower:
It's not a matter of teaching that the holocaust never happened. Or, to rephrase, it's not a question of denying that the Nazis killed many millions they perceived as 'undesirables', and that the largest segment of these were Jews.

Actually, this is a common historical inaccuracy. An estimated 35-50 Million people died during W.W.II, only 6 Million of which were Jews. The Jews weren't the only people targeted by the Nazis. Not by far. They started with Poland, and ended with Russia, where they were finally defeated, after conquering most of the World. Problem was they bit off more than they could chew. Made too many enemies, and not enough allys. And, the allys they did make, they ended up betraying. Deals and Treaties were made and then swiftly broken.

Not only did they go around invading whole countries one after the other, but they also singled out specific political and religious groups within their own country of Germany(besides the Jews). They also targeted Communists, Protestants, and Catholics to name just a few, off-hand. These, too, were deported, sent to labor camps, imprisoned, and murdered. Basically any group which disagreed with the will of the Nazis, or were in their way, or had something they wanted (resources, i.e. land), they perceived as their enemy, and were all victims of the Nazis. The whole world suffered from W.W.II, not just the German Jews.

quote:

It's not a matter of teaching that the holocaust never happened. Or, to rephrase, it's not a question of denying that the Nazis killed many millions they perceived as 'undesirables', and that the largest segment of these were Jews.

It's a question of the propaganda use to which this horror has been put for the past sixty years.

Actually, I think many of the Holocaust deniers deny that 6 million Jews were systematically killed. There may be groups that believe as you say as well, but I don't think they are deemed Holocaust deniers. My mother has dealt with this in the past and the people who are the problem put forth a type of conspiracy theory about the Jewish control of the media and the fabrication of history. Their belief is that it wasn't anywhere close to 6 million Jews that were killed and they have elaborate theories about how evidence was manipulated.

We don't get many of the posts here at AP but I remember that at ask.com there was occasionally a post about the Jews and the conspiracy of the Holocaust. Of course, there would also be moon landing conspiracy posts, area 54 posts, etc...