Holocaust Education 25 Years On

Challenges, Issues, Opportunities

Andy Pearce, Arthur Chapman, Andy Pearce, Arthur Chapman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429823725
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The year 2016 marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of statutory teaching and learning about the Holocaust in English state-maintained schools, which was introduced with the first English National Curriculum in 1991. The year 2016 also saw the publication of the largest empirical research study on Holocaust education outcomes – the UCL Centre for Holocaust Education's What Do Students Know and Understand About the Holocaust?

This book presents a systematic reflection on the outcomes of this quarter-century of Holocaust education in England and the Centre's wider work to reflect on the forms and the limitations of children's knowledge about the Holocaust and of English Holocaust education resources. These papers are then contextualised in two ways: through papers that situate English Holocaust education historiographically and in England's wider Holocaust culture; and through papers from America, Switzerland, and Germany that place the UCL Centre for Holocaust Education's findings in a wider and comparative perspective. Overall, the book presents unique empirical insights into teaching and learning processes and outcomes in Holocaust education and enables these to be theorised and explored systematically.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History.

The Holocaust in the National Curriculum after 25 years

Andy Pearce

ABSTRACT

This article provides a historical overview of the position of the Holocaust within the National Curriculum since 1991. Through close analysis of the five iterations of the curriculum, it traces changes and continuities in how teaching and learning about the Holocaust has been stipulated by successive governments. By contextualizing these with reference to shifts in England’s Holocaust culture, it is shown that the National Curriculum has acted as a fulcrum for the evolution of Holocaust consciousness. However, it is also argued that many of the faults and failures, challenges and shortcomings within the National Curriculum are symbiotic and closely entwined with wider issues in Britain’s Holocaust culture.

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”

“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.

“I don’t much care where –” said Alice.

“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.

“–so long as I get SOMEWHERE.” Alice added as explanation.

“Oh you’re sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if you only walk long enough.”

—Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

The history of teaching and learning about the Holocaust in the United Kingdom over the past generation is a story of success, achievement, and change. It is also a history of failure, shortcomings, and inhibiting continuities. As such, the ways educators have taught and students have learnt about the genocide of Europe’s Jews over the last three decades suitably reflect and embody the long-standing characteristics of British – or, more specifically English – Holocaust consciousness.¹

At the center of this chronicle is the National Curriculum.² Ever since the first curriculum of 1991, the Holocaust has been named within the rubric of the history syllabus. Not only has it survived periodic revisions of the curriculum, but each new iteration has in fact enhanced its status. Furthermore, though the Holocaust has only ever been a mandatory requirement in the National Curriculum for history, over the last 25 years other subjects have increasingly broached the subject as well. The primary benefits of these developments have been twofold – contributing to a significant expansion in the level of awareness among a generation of young people, and helping to invest “the Holocaust” as a cultural concept and social construction with considerable semiotic power. These advances have such salience because of the haphazard way in which the Holocaust was taught prior to 1991, and the generally underdeveloped condition of Holocaust culture in Britain during the first three decades after 1945.

The education system has thus played a central role in the formation of a Holocaust culture in the United Kingdom – particularly in England, which is the focus of this article.³ It is here that the National Curriculum has reached millions of schoolchildren, and in turn had the greatest impact in shaping Holocaust consciousness. Reflecting on how and why this has been the case, as well as the types of historical thinking the curriculum has inculcated, is only more apposite given the academization of the English education system. The ability of academies and free schools to choose the structure and content of their curricula has contributed to the strange and slow death of a truly national curriculum in England, but in the process it has fundamentally eroded the idea of teaching and learning about the Holocaust being a statutory requirement of state-maintained schools. With the number of academies and free schools increasing dramatically since 2010, and the current government quite open about its wish for all schools to become academies, the future position of the Holocaust in school curricula is in jeopardy.⁴

Outwardly, at least, central government presently maintains “that every young person should be taught the history of the Holocaust and the lessons it teaches today.”⁵ The latter part of this aspiration is, of course, extremely contentious: among other things, analogous thinking “wrongly assumes the past is a given.”⁶ For those who believe in and want there to be “Holocaust lessons,” such realities can be easily ignored. Increasing young people’s historical knowledge and understanding on the other hand might not be straightforward, but it is desirable for the pursuit of “critical being” and arguably more justifiable as a tangible pedagogical endeavor.⁷

For the time being, most students continue to encounter the Holocaust as part of their formal education and commonly within school history – often because their schools choose to follow the National Curriculum. The nature of these encounters, and the effect and impact they have on students’ knowledge and understanding of the Holocaust, are altogether different matters. As the research showcased in this special issue demonstrates, for all the interest and enthusiasm students demonstrate towards learning about the Holocaust, the condition of their substantive historical knowledge and the shapes of their conceptual understandings give much cause for concern.⁸ Some of the shortcomings in students’ knowledge are in fact so elemental, and some of their understandings so fundamentally wrong, that one is forced to question how this can be possible after a generation of state-sponsored teaching in schools. When one also factors in the considerable sums of public treasure invested in “Holocaust education” by successive governments and the gamut of extracurricular activities in culture more broadly, the resonance of these research findings is only louder, clearer, and more disturbing to the ear. They pose compelling questions about the nature of teaching and learning about the Holocaust in this country: its core precepts, its central aims and intended outcomes, and how far the popular understandings of “Holocaust education” are suitably cognizant of what teaching and learning actually entail.

The principal purpose of this article is to provide an overview of the history of the Holocaust in the English curriculum over the last quarter of a century. Its focus will be on how the Holocaust has been positioned and framed within the National Curriculum, and the ways this has or has not altered since 1991. The analysis approaches the curriculum and its stipulations in two registers: as a policy statement and program for action on the one hand, and as a representational (and representative) entity on the other. Through these lenses, we acquire insight into the thinking of the governments of the day, and perspective on the cultural standing of the Holocaust at any given time. In working towards these outcomes, the article thus serves a secondary purpose: it weaves a backcloth onto which the other articles of this special issue can be juxtaposed and viewed. Some of the themes and issues it presents are taken up by others in this collection; these include knowledge, the relationship between the realms of education, culture, and society, and questions of pedagogy – in particular, purpose and practice.

Ambiguity over aims and confusion over rationale are hallmarks of the history of the Holocaust in the curriculum. One might say uncertainty as to why the Holocaust should be taught has led to much drift and dawdle; research shows that, when teaching about the Holocaust, teachers have a penchant for nebulous, generalized, overarching learning objectives instead of ones more suited to their subject discipline, and they are dismissive of the possibility – even the need – for exercises in evaluation or assessment.⁹ Meanwhile, the championing of cross-curricular and whole school approaches to teaching the Holocaust, by teachers, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and members of parliament (MPs),¹⁰ has tended not to be accompanied by substantial theorization about subject disciplinarity or coherent planning.¹¹ The result is that students speak of the importance of “the Holocaust” and their eagerness to know more, all the while constructing reductive narratives about what “it” was, and exhibiting rudimentary understandings shorn of criticality.

At the same time, the spaces created by the Holocaust in the curriculum have allowed particular approaches and conceptions of what “Holocaust education” is and entails to be popularized. This helps account for the desire of most teachers that their students “learn the lessons” of the Holocaust¹² – a laudable objective, perhaps, but one risking essentialism.¹³ Still, it would be unfair to blame teachers alone for this tendency, when it is one with immense cultural currency and political capital. Here then is the nub, for within the discourse popularized by politicians, commentators, and even some working in the field, there is often little to no space for pedagogy; instead of contemplating the intricate and complex ways in which teaching and learning interface, the compulsive and unthinking assumption is that it is enough just to have the Holocaust in the curriculum – as if this guarantees it will be “taught” and, in some osmotic fashion, subsequently “learnt.” Like Alice in Wonderland, then, it is as if it doesn’t really matter what we teach, how, or why, so long as somewhere, somehow, students are exposed to what the late David Cesarani depicted as the “standardized version” of “the Holocaust.”¹⁴ This, it seems to be presumed, will be enough to ensure they “Never Forget,” intone “Never Again,” and become better, nicer people. Such flawed thinking is not solely attributable to the National Curriculum, but that it exists at all raises serious questions about the history of the Holocaust in the cur...