Contemporary Debates in Holocaust Education

M. Gray

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137388575
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Teología judía

Holocaust education is a rapidly evolving and controversial field. This book, which critically analyses the very latest research, adopts a global perspective and discusses a number of the most important debates which are emerging within it such as teaching the Holocaust without survivors and the role of digital technology in the classroom.

1

Perceptions, Knowledge and Attitudes

Abstract: Research across the globe suggests that both students and teachers approach the subject of the Holocaust with ideological and historical preconceptions and that in some places knowledge of the topic is very limited indeed. Drawing on a number of studies from around the world, the relationship between ignorance and prejudice is explored as well as the way that attitudes and understandings can shape the nature of Holocaust education. Discussion is made concerning what ought to be considered as the expected standard of knowledge and whether existing scholarship has sometimes demanded too high a level of expertise from Holocaust educators.

Keywords: anti-Semitism; attitudes; ignorance; knowledge; preconceptions; prejudice

Gray, Michael. Contemporary Debates in Holocaust Education. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. DOI: 10.1057/9781137388575.0005.

Connecting the two educational pillars of teaching and learning seems axiomatic. After all, how can effective teaching take place if there is no effective learning? Until recently, however, Holocaust education and certainly the scholarship within this particular field has typically focused on the teaching at the expense of the learning, or more precisely, the learner. Debates about the content of Holocaust curricula, the subject’s uniqueness and the aims of teaching it have been important, and at times very productive, yet they have inadvertently marginalised the value of accounting for the learners; their preconceptions, attitudes, understandings and outlook.

Shemilt notes that ‘programmes of history education should be informed by knowledge of how adolescents make sense of what is taught.’¹ This might be broadened even further and connected to notions of historical consciousness whereby ‘those concerned with history education are looking beyond school for the ways in which the past figures in youngsters’ views of the world’,² both epistemologically and ontologically in a reciprocal, two-way relationship. In their valuable study for the National Research Council, Donovan and Bransford stated:

Being learning-centred, then, involves paying attention to students’ backgrounds and cultural values, as well as to their abilities. To build effectively on what learners bring to the classroom, teachers must pay close attention to individual students’ starting points and to their progress on learning tasks.³

The relationship between what Rüsen calls lebenspraxis (practical life)⁴ and more formalised education within the classroom is an important one. Relating this to Holocaust education involves understanding students’ perceptions. What do they understand by terms such as ‘concentration camp’, ‘Nazi’ or ‘Jew’? What attitudes and assumptions underpin these understandings? Moreover, what preconceptions about the Holocaust have students acquired before they formally study the subject in school? Of course, readjusting the focus to include the learner ought not to be at the expense of those teaching the learner. What are the perceptions, knowledge and attitudes of teachers? How much ought they to know about the Holocaust and how much do they know? To what extent do their prejudices and biases affect learners? These are some of the questions which studies are now beginning to address.

Teachers’ knowledge of the Holocaust

Many of the studies which have sought to measure or assess knowledge of the Holocaust have been carried out on random samples of the public. The American Jewish Committee (AJC), for example, surveyed about 1,000 people in each of Germany, Austria, France, Poland, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States of America. Despite some very poorly constructed questions in this study, it concluded that knowledge of the Holocaust is ‘low and uneven in most countries’.⁵ Jedwab’s research on 1,500 Canadians concluded that ‘just over 90% of Canadians surveyed are aware of the Holocaust’⁶ while ‘65% of respondents agreed that they had good knowledge’.⁷ Jedwab, however, did not test knowledge of the Holocaust but rather respondents’ perceptions of their knowledge. This is somewhat problematic seeing that two individuals who have a different conception of what constitutes ‘good knowledge’ of the Holocaust may both consider that their knowledge is good when the levels of their knowledge may in fact be very different. Despite these concerns, Jedwab is right to bemoan the scarcity of studies which measure Holocaust knowledge and to call for a discussion about ‘the minimal criteria to be considered adequately “informed” on the subject’.⁸

It would seem reasonable to argue that those teaching about the Holocaust ought to have greater knowledge than those who do not teach the subject. After all, as Lange states in his study of Swedish practitioners’ perceptions and experiences of teaching the Holocaust:

Teachers constitute an ‘elite’. They are well-educated individuals who have been given – and have accepted – responsibility for a task that is of fundamental importance to society, namely that of conveying and facilitating the acquisition of basic knowledge and values among new generations of the members of society.⁹

Yet the existing evidence, limited though it is, certainly suggests that teachers’ knowledge of the Holocaust is not satisfactory. Depending on how one interprets the data and the standard that is employed, there could even be a case to argue that the level of knowledge is woefully inadequate.

Out of the existing research, two major studies stand out as the most valuable and methodologically robust. The first of these was conducted by Lange on over 5,000 teachers in Sweden, the second by the Holocaust Education Development Programme (HEDP) on 2,108 teachers in England.¹⁰ Although neither survey was principally exploring teachers’ knowledge, both asked a series of relatively similar questions to respondents including what percentage of Germany’s 1933 population consisted of Jews and questions that required knowledge of some of the specific camps which were used exclusively for the murdering of Jews. Lange had 11 questions in total which tested teachers’ Holocaust knowledge, while the HEDP survey asked nine questions on the subject. The results appeared to demonstrate a distinct absence of knowledge. Lange wrote:

Only 2 [of 5081] teachers answered all of the questions correctly, and a further fourteen gave correct answers in relation to all but one of the questions. 7.8% answered all of the questions incorrectly, 27.8 answered all but one incorrectly, 26% gave two correct answers and 16.6% gave three correct answers. Thus 70.4% of the respondents gave incorrect answers to at least eight of the eleven questions.¹¹

Foster, the Director of the HEDP, found similar results.

Only 48 of the 1,816 (2.6%) teachers who responded to the online questionnaire answered all the questions correctly where 687 teachers (37.8%) either provided one or no correct answer to any of the questions.¹²

Lange acknowledges that ‘testing teachers’ knowledge – irrespective of the type of knowledge in question – is a problematic venture’,¹³ while Foster too states that ‘mapping knowledge in any subject is an inherently complex undertaking’ and thus ‘it would be imprudent to make sweeping generalisations about teachers’ subject knowledge’.¹⁴ It is difficult to know whether Lange and the HEDP, in their respective studies, would expect the majority of their respondents to provide the correct answer to the majority of the questions posed. If so, then this is very intellectually demanding and while it is useful to begin to establish an agreed benchmark for what is ‘adequate knowledge’ for a teacher to hold, this particular model perhaps seems too challenging. It must be taken into account that teachers are not expected to be Holocaust specialists and that this is just one part of what is often a very large curriculum. With that in mind, asking them the specific name attributed to the Nazi genocide of the Roma¹⁵ and whether or not Roosevelt was the only leader to publicly condemn the events of Kristallnacht seems to be a very high standard.¹⁶ Moreover, many of the respondents were not history teachers. Jedwab percepti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Perceptions, Knowledge and Attitudes
• 2  Responses to Holocaust Education
• 3  The Quality of Research and Scholarship
• 4  Holocaust Universalisation
• 5  Teaching the Holocaust without Survivors
• 6  The Digital Era of Holocaust Education
• Bibliography
• Index