This story from Southern California was on our local news last night. The Rialto school district, in San Bernadino County, is under fire for a history assignment given to grade 8 students. The meat of the assignment, allegedly designed to develop students’ historical and analytical abilities, reads:
So, not only are they asked whether the holocaust actually occurred, they also apparently have to assess whether those nefarious Jews and their allies concocted the whole thing for political and financial gain.
I teach college history, and i believe that there’s plenty of value in asking students to engage with historical debates, and to assess evidence in order to come to their own conclusions. There are dozens of examples of historical controversy that are amenable to investigation regarding causes, outcomes, counterfactual possibilities, etc. etc.
I also think that there’s an argument to be made, in public debate and historical consciousness, for not treating the Holocaust like such a special historical case. Rather than defining it as somehow outside of history, as uniquely evil and an event that is fundamentally and essentially different from any other, i think there’s a good argument to be made that it’s of a piece with other acts of genocide, and is eminently historically comprehensible.
But an assignment about whether the Holocaust actually happened? Please. While history is, by its very nature, a discipline subject to differences of interpretation, there are some historical events where the evidence is so overwhelming, and historians in such agreement, that any question about the existence of the event itself is a pointless intellectual exercise. As the ADL rep in the linked story says, asking this question “has no academic value; it only gives legitimacy to the hateful and anti-Semitic promoters of Holocaust denial.”
It sounds like the easiest A the students will ever get. As well as a reasonably good introduction to historical revisionism.
I mean, come on - on the one side, we have thousands of eyewitness accounts, documented photographs, mountains of physical evidence, court transcripts of sworn testimony. On the other, we have a few pathetic neo-Nazi halfwits spouting the most transparent tissue of lies one can imagine.
If anything, this could be a counter-balance to the “everyone is entitled to their own opinion, as long as they have good self-esteem” tripe that gets pitched in the schools sometimes. If you can’t show something as obvious as the Holocaust, junior high strikes me as just the right level of school for you.
The problem is that school students have neither the time nor, in many cases, the analytical ability, to investigate ALL the sources for any given historical subject. You can’t just let them loose on the internet and tell them to work out whether or not the Holocaust was real.
Most of these exercises that require students to analyze historical sources begin with the instructor either providing a range of sources for the students or, at a minimum, giving the students advice about where to find sources. And in cases like this—especially where students are provided with a range of sources and asked to read, analyze, and draw historical conclusions—one of the responsibilities of the instructor is to make sure that the students receive a representative set of historical documents so they can make a fair evaluation.
Take the historical question of whether or not it was necessary for the United States to use the atomic bomb on Japan at the end of World War Two. Whole books have been written about this topic, and a thorough investigation would require months or years of reading in thousands of historical documents. So, if you want students to deal with the issue, you have to provide a selection for them. Obviously, if you only give them documents showing criticisms of the decision to drop the bomb, you are putting your finger on the scale from the beginning, and not giving them a fair set of sources to analyze. The fairness and historical usefulness of the exercise rests on the professional judgment and historical judiciousness of the teacher.
I’m not even sure where i’d begin in trying to administer a classroom exercise on the question of whether the Holocaust was real. The good scholarship so heavily outweighs the bad that it would be very difficult to present “both sides” without implying that each side might be equally historically valid. You can’t just give 10 documents supporting the reality of the Holocaust and 10 against, because that gives the deniers an implied credibility that they do not merit…
Also, school students themselves, especially at grade 8, might not have the historical and analytical sophistication to identify the bad history. It’s not like Holocaust deniers such as David Irving spout a bunch of virulent antisemitism. If you read their arguments with little background knowledge or context, they often sound eminently reasonable, and many students might not realize that their arguments are historically untenable.
I would actually be interested to see the lesson plan and the documents used for this particular assignment. I think it would be fascinating to see what they actually had the students read.
I doubt if anyone on earth has the time to investigate all the sources for information about the Holocaust.
How hard can it be to come up with a representative sampling of sources so that students can decide whether or not the Holocaust happened? Because it is really, really, really obvious that it did. This is not at all a difficult determination to make.
That is not a historical question; it is a moral and philosophical question that can be illuminated by historical research.
Plus, you can make a reasonable case for both sides of that question. It is not possible to make a reasonable case that the Holocaust didn’t happen.
Why on earth would you bother implying that Holocaust revisionism is anything other than what it is?
There is no need to “present both sides”. One side is wrong and stupid.
If history cannot show definitively that the Holocaust happened, then history is a completely useless subject.
If 8th graders can’t see something as obvious as this, then history is not going to be a subject they can handle at all. Because the topic as proposed is really, really easy.
It’s rather like arguing that 8th graders cannot be taught to add or subtract two digit numbers, because they might get the answer wrong. At some point they are going to have to master the material. And they need to get the easy stuff out of the way first.
This is not like arguing about the existence of God or who should have won the 2000 Presidential elections or something like that. It is a question to which there is a very clear and easily demonstrable answer.
If the idea of this paper is to show students how to examine both sides of an issue, then they need to pick some issue where there is more than one side. “Did the Holocaust happen, or was it faked to get sympathy for Israel” is not a question to which there is more than one side.
There is a mountain of evidence that it happened, but any good historical debate should focus on a question where there is some genuine doubt. There is no genuine doubt that the Holocaust happened, therefore the debate is rather pointless. Any effort to provide a representative sample of documents, if it is honest, will ONLY use documents that support the reality of the Holocaust, which makes for a rather pointless debate. And IF such an exercise DID use documents by deniers, it would be granting those documents a credibility they did not deserve. As i’ve already stated quite clearly.
Well, sort of. Like so many other things, you get this sort-of right, if the reader squints enough.
The question of using the bomb does have significant moral and philosophical components, especially when you’re talking about the morality of killing civilians, of using the weapon itself, and a variety of other issues. But historians who debate the issue also focus on specifically historical questions, such as whether or not Japan was ready to surrender before the bombs were dropped, how many American troops and how much time and money would have been necessary to take the home islands using conventional techniques, the comparative military and strategic usefulness of dropping one bomb versus dropping two, etc., etc. These issues have moral and philosophical components, but also rely on the analysis and interpretation of historical evidence, and are historical questions. “necessary” is not simply a moral and philosophical term; it depends on what the “necessary” is for.
Precisely the point i was making.
Precisely the point i was making.
Precisely the point i was making.
If you are, indeed, attempting to give students an example of how to examine two sides of an issue, the existence of the Holocaust is a pointless exercise because there is no reasonable case to be made that it didn’t happen.
It is clear that you completely failed to understand my post. Never did i once claim, or even suggest or imply, that history cannot show definitively that the Holocaust happened. In fact, the whole point of my post, which you seem to have either deliberately ignored, or failed to grasp, is precisely that the existence of the Holocaust is so beyond dispute that there’s no point even setting a historical exercise to investigate the issue.history cannot show definitively that the Holocaust happened"Did the Holocaust happen, or was it faked to get sympathy for Israel" is not a question to which there is more than one side.
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Again, precisely the point i was making.
My whole point was that, in any investigation where there really are two (or more) possible interpretations, you need to be able to give students plausible evidence for multiple interpretations. You can’t really do that with the Holocaust.
If 8th graders can’t spot the blatant revisionism that is Holocaust denial, then they can’t do historical analysis at all at that age, and are better off memorizing “In fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue”.
That’s why I said earlier that this is basically a gimme question. The only reason I can think to assign such a topic is as an exercise in spotting revisionist history and bad debating tactics . Something like “Holocaust deniers claim Hitler never knew about the plan to exterminate the Jews. Discuss this in light of the testimony of Himmler, Eichmann, Höss, and others which state that the policy came directly from Hitler’s orders.”
Sure, your exercise would probably work just fine.
Your focus on Hitler’s knowledge, though, and your use of the phrase “plan to exterminate the Jews” complicates things, because some deniers have argued that there was no such plan, and no systematic extermination at all. Basically, your question assumes the existence of the Holocaust, but just asks a much narrower question of whether Hitler knew about, authorized, or ordered it. One of the strategies of some deniers has been to explicitly reject the testimony of Himmler, Eichmann, etc., as self-serving, or offered under coercion.
More generally, your question starts by identifying a group called “Holocaust deniers.” In doing this, and in the way you word the question, you are tipping the balance in the direction of acknowledging the Holocaust right at the start of the assignment. That’s completely fine, given the preponderance of evidence, but the question asked by the school district mentioned in the OP doesn’t do that. It is asked in a way that suggests that the question is really an open and undecided issue, and that students might find decent evidence one way or the other. That’s why i suggested that i’d be interested to see exactly what the school district asked the kids to read in giving them this assignment.
My basic position is that even asking a question about the existence of the Holocaust gives the deniers a legitimacy they don’t deserve. I teach US history, and i don’t begin a discussion of the civil rights movement by asking my students to write a paper stating whether or not they believe that racial discrimination and segregation actually existed in Alabama in 1950. And if some shitty historian writes a book claiming that “thousands” of blacks fought for the Confederacy, and that two black battalions fought for the South under the command of Stonewall Jackson, i’m not going to give that shitty historian credibility she doesn’t deserve by actually asking my students to discuss her ridiculous claims.
There are plenty of good historical questions worth asking, and good historical debates worth having. We needn’t waste time debating the stuff that is beyond question.
Who gets to decide which truths are not to be discussed in an educational environment?
How about “Discuss why the Pope persecuted Galileo.” Would that have any educational value? How about “Discuss why the British Redcoats resisted the American Revolution.”
The biggest obstacle to education is the thesis that certain truths are self-evident.
These would both be perfectly reasonable questions. The problem is that they are very different, in terms of their historical inquiry and the problems they seek to illuminate, than the question of whether the Holocaust occurred. Can you not see the different nature of these question? Do you truly think they are equivalent?
It’s not that the existence of the Holocaust is simply “self-evident.”
It’s that the existence of the Holocaust has been established, through years of research, using mountains of evidence, by a vast array of historical scholars. The support for the existence of the Holocaust is so overwhelming and incontrovertible that it is essentially an exercise in futility to even discuss it.
There are plenty of reasonable questions we might ask about the Holocaust. Whether the Holocaust occurred, however, is not one of those reasonable questions. If i can use one of your own questions as a example, asking whether the Holocaust occurred is not like asking why the British resisted the American Revolution; it is more like asking whether the American Revolution occurred at all. Do you think that would be a productive avenue of inquiry for an 8th-grade history class?
History is about questions, it’s about analysis, it’s about interpretation, it’s about debate, and it’s about revising earlier understandings. But this doesn’t mean that it’s a simple exercise in opinion, and nor does it mean that all historical questions and historical debates are deserving of equal consideration. There comes a time, in many historical questions, when we can reasonably say that the question of whether this or that historical event actually occurred has been settled, once and for all.
I guess, then, that it would depend on the purpose of the essay. If the idea is to teach them how to spot bad, revisionist history, “Did the Holocaust happen?” is a good topic. If the idea is to teach them how to do historical analysis, it’s a pretty bad one.
It might be interesting to see the teacher’s materials for this. If the push is “teach students how to analyze both sides of an issue, and make up their own minds”, it’s pretty dumb. If it’s to say “this will serve as a basic introduction to how to lie and falsify history, and equip students to spot this kind of dishonesty”, that’s something else.
I seem to remember a story about a school that gave an assignment to do a report on “Male Pregnancy” using the internet (which was pretty new at the time). There was one, very well done, hoax website that explained the new breakthrough procedure that showed up high on search results. The kids all did their reports on Male Pregnancy using that one website (which actually did have a small disclaimer that it was a hoax on one of the information pages), and learned the important lesson that you can’t just use one source that you find on the internet, no matter how good it seems. Maybe this is another “gotcha!” sort of assignment or meta-assignment or something.
OK, I’ve managed to track down a copy of the assignment, along with the documents they provided to the students.
Perhaps the first thing for me to say is that, while it was very problematic for the school to suggest that the existence of the Holocaust is even up for debate, what strikes me as equally bad (in terms of educational and pedagogical issues) is the types of sources provided for the students. If this is how history is taught in school, it’s no wonder my students enter my college-level history classes with no idea of what constitutes reliable evidence or credible sources.
The first step in this process, according to the instructions, is for the students to:
Emphasis mine.
The students were then provided with three articles to read. I had expected that an assignment like this would make use of primary source materials, but alas, they were nowhere to be found.
Of the three sources provided, two were fairly mainstream (if rather limited) representations of the Holocaust, sites that accepted its existence and that attempted to explain some of the major characteristics of the Holocaust, including statistics, definitions, background, historical overview, antisemitism, consequences, etc.
The problem is that the best of these sites was a History Channel site, and the other one was an about.com site! Here they are:
The History Channel’s essay is, for the most part, perfectly fine for school students, but this still isn’t the first place i’d send students for historical information. I’m partly prejudiced because of the History Channel’s slide into reality-TV bullshit, but more generally, there are just so many better, more reputable places to get information. Why not start with the Holocaust Memorial Museum, which has a whole lot of excellent material, written and curated by experts, and specifically designed for educators and students?
As for using about.com as a reliable scholarly source, I really don’t know what to say. No wonder my students, coming out of high school, sometimes think it’s appropriate to use Wikipedia and Answers.com as sources for university-level papers.
Basically any Holocaust denial website is, by definition, going to lack credibility, but they really went all out to find about the most obscure, strange site imaginable:
A site from Australia called Bible Believers, apparently devoted, for the most part, to discussions of the Second Coming of Christ. The information on their Holocaust Hoax page is mainly sources from “mainstream” Holocaust denialists, like the Institute for Historical Review, but you’d think they could have found the information somewhere other than a fringe millennialist evangelical organization.
Apart from these three sources, students were told that they might also, “if your teacher allows you to,” visit other websites for additional information. The two sites provided were about.com (again) and the Institute of Historical Research at the University of London (the only really good site provided in the whole exercise).
Once they’ve done all their reading, they are then to consider the following questions:
After all this, they are to write their final essay, answering the main question raised at the beginning.
Obviously, we can’t know exactly how individual teachers would have handled this in the classroom, but there’s nothing in the exercise itself suggesting that it’s anything other than an exercise in analyzing competing claims. It’s a complete disaster, in my opinion. I’m teaching a graduate-level class this semester called History Teaching Seminar, for Masters students who intend to become high-school teachers, and I’m taking this assignment with me to class this week as an example of about a half-dozen things NOT to do when designing a lesson.
But students need to consider both sides. And there are always two sides to every argument - historical, scientific, what have you. Who could be against such a basic principle of learning?
For their next assignment, students could take up slavery in America. Was it a great moral wrong or were blacks well treated and far better off under their masters than they are in today’s society? (for greater balance, students will read source materials evenly divided between those provided by eminent historians and Stormfront).
Some say one thing, some say another. There’s always two sides and we can never really say for sure one way or the other. And remember, experts have been wrong before.
Not in this case. Their were survivors. Multiple people who were arrested and admitted to what was happening. Also the military reports of when they went in and liberated the death camps. And lots of other evidence.
Can we follow it up with the “Trail of Tears: Native American Genocide or Castling Your Opponent’s Pieces to Forestall Checkmate (The Best Plan We Could Think Of)?”