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I’m literally finishing up a paper today about how effective Holocaust education can change the way students feel about human rights and social justice broadly. So it’s useful to see how many people don’t understand the Holocaust beyond the very simple “it was the worst thing.”
The paper is just a first pass at the theory behind a 5 year study I did with @Steinacher33, but it underscores the importance of not only teaching the Holocaust but teaching it with a view to its contemporary lessons and not simply as an awful but idiosyncratic historical event.
It’s too easy to learn that the Holocaust happened long ago in a far away place to different people. When that happens it appears not to be connected to things that are happening today, things that we can do something about right now that, while not *the Holocaust*, are terrible.
What we hypothesized and then tested was that the teaching materials matter a lot when it comes to making the Holocaust *matter* to students. Teaching it as history, using straightforward historical textbooks, will allow students to learn the material but not to care about it.
When students read a history book, they can pass a test on the subject. They know what happened, where, when, and to whom. But it feels disconnected from them, an event in the now-distant past. However, when they read first-person narratives, that all changes in measurable ways.
Students are more engaged by first-person accounts: more likely to keep that book rather than sell it back, more likely to talk to family and friends about the topic, more likely to visit office hours, and more likely to attend a lecture or film screening on a related topic.
We need to teach the Holocaust. Lots of states, including mine, don’t mandate it and they must. But when we teach it, we ought to make sure it’s personal, that it’s not just dates and places but that it’s people and stories (and not just victims; bystanders and perpetrators too).
