While on this issue I think A.'s parents are wrong, I think you need to learn to not worry so much about other people’s lives. If parents want to bring their children up in a certain way they should. They do it all the time. Parents pass along a great deal of things that I am sure you think are wrong, but that is simply because people all believe different things.
I should also point out that I didn’t learn about the Holocost in school either. Heck, I didn’t even know what a Jew was until high school, and that was because I saw it on TV and talked to my parents about it, and they never realized I didn’t know (lived in a SMALL town, and this stuff just didn’t come up). And guess what, I turned out fine.
When A. goes off to college, she will learn about things her parents tried to hide her from, and college is less likely to let her sit out.
No form of creationism, including “creation science” can be taught as “fact” or as science on any public school. Creationism can only be discussed within the context of classes about religion.
Some facets of history may be whitewashed, sanitized or selectively spun in public schools but facts are not simply invented out of whole cloth. A school might choose not to talk much about slavery, for instance, but it couldn’t deny that slavery ever occurred.
Krokodil, here’s the thing: if a parent pulls a kid out of a class because the class is teaching incorrect information, and the information is falsifiable, then I look at whether the information is correct or not.
If the information is incorrect, then I say not only should the kid not be in the class – the teacher should also be forced to correct the information. A teacher who teaches children that Thomas Jeferson never had slaves, or that Egyptians built the pyramids in Guatemala, should be absolutely required to cease and desist with the bullshit.
If the information is correct, then the parents have no leg to stand on when it comes to removing the kids from the class.
In this case, the parents are trying to remove the kid because they claim the teacher is teaching incorrect information. But they’re wrong. Therefore they don’t have a leg to stand on.
The teacher, IMO, should do the unit on Anne Frank and include a section on the evils of Holocaust Denial. And that poor kid should get a chance to hear every word of it.
Against the parent’s wishes? Fuck the parents. I don’t care about the parents. I care about the kid.
The parents are almost certainly too far gone to educate. Talking to them will be useless unless one enjoys wrangles to no purpose.
There’s certainly hope for the daughter, especially if she goes on to higher education, reads books and newspapers, sees movies and eventually understands what bigots her parents are.
“…Heck, I didn’t even know what a Jew was until high school…”
Didn’t you have show-and-tell in the elementary grades?
Even if you accept the premise that no one died in German concentration camps in WWII, what does that have to do with Anne Frank’s Diary? Do the objecting parents claim that she didn’t exist? That her family didn’t live, scared to death, in an attic for years? That they weren’t discovered and taken away? I don’t think even David Irving claimed that.
And if the school takes the attitude that the parents have a right to define curriculum for a single student, how will they handle her grade when the class is given a test on Frank’s Diary and she doesn’t know anything about it?
Originally posted by Gadfly
Who the fuck denies the holocaust? 6 million Jews don’t just disappear! What the hell happened? Were they shunted into sewers, where they became mole people? Are they colonizing space? Are they now digging holes in which people plug fucking straw men?
Since Gadfly’s comment was made in the context of a discussion of Anne Frank, it seems entirely appropriate to me.
And I’m sure you’re aware that the “perception” of which you speak is commonly held by bigots of the same stripe as the parents in the OP.
My daughter tells me that A. asserts that Anne’s father wrote the book.
No idea where that comes from, but wasn’t there a little dust-up a few years back, late 90’s maybe, when Mr. Frank was trying to “revise” the original manuscript? I forget the specifics, but if I remember this correctly, he was widely seen as simply trying to cast himself in a more favorable light, especially with respect to his relationships with the other “prisoners.” I remember some sort of controversy that had to do with his attempts to alter some passages of his daughter’s original text-- which, of course, the world got to read, warts and all. Surely Anne could have never suspected that her book would be read all around the world, much less outside of the attic she hid in.
I can see how someone with a preconceived bias going in could take a fragment of a story they misunderstand to begin with and blowing it up into some sort of “evidence” of fraud.
I have a copy of the “extended” edition. Otto Frank felt that some of her entries were too personal and excluded them from the original version. Some dealt with Anne’s sexuality, others were things she wrote about her family when she was mad.
Most of the cuts for sexuality involve Anne’s relationship with the teenage boy staying in the Annex (his name escapes me at the moment). Anne described several conversations with him in which they compared genitalia and the like, things I doubt a father would be comfortable putting out in the open.
If I remember, a few lines were deleted to remove harsh criticism of Anne’s family. He was afraid the world would judge his family (of which he was the only survivor) by Anne’s typical teenage “I hate my parents” rants.
In recent editions, those parts have been put back in.
** If we were discussing the problems faced by the Roma, and I said that 800,000 people died during the Holocaust, I’m sure you’d call me on it. It makes a difference.
Bingo. Don’t give them more material on which to feed by speaking (or typing) thoughtlessly.
I say leave these parents to their chosen ignorance.
Be sure to have an ongoing conversation with your daughter which reflects some of the same points and arguments on this thread just in case A or her parents are capable of effective witnessing.
Don’t worry about A at all. If she is the normal teenage girl you describe, she will soon become her school’s resident expert on all things Holocaust.
Diogenes said, “Parents don’t have a right to withhold education from their children.”
Sadly, my friend, they DO have the right to withhold education. And twist information. They have the right to raise their kid any old way they want. If I was the OP, I’d make it clear to my daughter that she has every right to debate the fact with her friend, but I wouldn’t get in the parent’s face. Hopefully, as the kid gets older, she’ll see that her parents are full of shit.
I agree with other posters that the best way to fight bullshit is to arm yourself with the facts. You can not control your daughter’s contact with A., so you must be prepared to rationally and calmly refute any nonsense that your daughter may come home spouting as a result of contact with her.
How do YOU know the Holocaust happened? If it’s only through your history teacher or a book, you only only lend creedence to the thought that it’s simply received knowledge with no basis. The initial newsreel footage, films of General Eisenhower’s tour of the camps, and all sorts of other documentary evidence exist. Make sure you expose your daughter to it. She’ll take care of A. to whatever extent she wishes to, and will make her own decisions about their future association.
Meanwhile, your school should get not one moment’s peace from you and other parents about this incident. Demand to know at what other times any students were allowed to wallow in ignorance at the behest of morons? What kind of operation are they running there? Make it clear to the members of the school board that your vote in the next local election rides on their handling of this issue.
As for the creation thread of this discussion, and whether or not evolution is taught as a fact in schools, there has been a serious movement in the past to exclude any mention of evolution in textbooks used in Texas. Since Texas accounts for huge numbers of textbook orders from publishers, this omission has drastic national effects. Parents who deny the Holocaust now seem like kooks, but wait until they get a little power over textbook selection in the great state of Texas. I know this sounds reactionary and just as kooky as the other kooks I’m talking about, but check it out. Texas has huge sway with what textbooks are used in our nation. If a topic like evolution is successfully challenged, and left out of a TEXTbook, anything is possible, isn’t it?
Gotta go with TVAA on this, if only because 10.5 million people in general is a far more impressive number than 6 million people. In an overwhelming and unimaginable way of being impressive, of course. It is also more likely to bang a hole in a denier’s defenses if you are able personalize it by showing how someone like him could have been a victim, too. Many people who are not Jews are gay or Roma or handicapped or snotty wiseasses (the people on this board? the first to go!) or insane. A’s parents could qualify as the last.
That right is limited, isn’t it? I mean, there ARE truancy laws and child labor laws, laws against child abuse both physical and mental. Society DOES dictate that certain child-rearing philosophies and methods are unacceptable.
I believe that parents should be allowed to tell their kids that the Holocaust doesn’t exist – but they should NOT be allowed to prevent schoolteachers and other government officials from correcting their lies.
Originally posted by Jackmannii
Since Gadfly’s comment was made in the context of a discussion of Anne Frank, it seems entirely appropriate to me.
Your analogy is inexact. Gadfly made no claims as to Jews being the only victims of the Holocaust or total number of casualties.
My understanding is that Holocaust denial, the subject of this thread*, is the stock-in-trade of people with a venomous hatred of Jews. If I am wrong about this, and there are Holocaust deniers who act on the basis of their pathologic loathing towards the Romany people, please alleviate my ignorance (with appropriate cites).
*I think there is little question that the parents in this episode are in fact Holocaust deniers. It’s one thing to question who authored the Diary of Anne Frank, and quite another to hold your kid out of a class (as though the very discussion of the book might somehow contaminate her). That’s the pathologic part.
Point taken. Yet when Gadfly brought up the ridiculousness of denying the Holocaust, what did he talk about? He didn’t sarcastically question where 10-11 million people vanished to, he asked about 6 million Jews.
In articles, books, and movies, I’ve noticed that it’s almost always the Jewish victims of the Holocaust that are talked about. It’s not that they deny the other victims – they’re just not mentioned, and reference is often made to the tragedy of “six million deaths”, etc.
Let’s face it – when Jewish people say “Never again”, it’s understood that they mean “no one will ever slaughter the Jews again”. How often do people speak out about the killings of homosexuals, and gypsies, and the mentally and physically handicapped? The Holocaust is almost always presented as a fundamentally Jewish tragedy. I do not consider this to be a good thing.
