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July 16, 2004
Why teach Holocaust?
Schools failing children as electives eclipse history.
PAT JOHNSON SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH BULLETIN
With choice becoming a guiding principle of public education and
core curricula effectively a thing of the past, some educators are
lamenting the fact that Canadian students are graduating with only
a vague understanding of 20th-century history, the Holocaust included.
Ontario recently joined British Columbia as one of several provinces
where the comprehensive teaching of 20th-century history has become,
itself, history. Students can still learn about 20th- century cataclysms
like the Holocaust, but only if they take an elective course such
as History 12. Even then, the depth of study into the Holocaust
is dependent almost completely on the teacher. This alarms Holocaust
educators like Frieda Miller, education co-ordinator at the Vancouver
Holocaust Education Centre.
"I think we're doing our kids a real disservice," said
Miller, who has helped author teaching resources the centre makes
available to teachers. "The Holocaust is central and can inform
so much of our understanding of genocide ... [ignoring it] is to
diminish the complexity of historical understanding."
The Holocaust Centre is one of the first places to which teachers
turn for backup in teaching this complex, disturbing and difficult
epoch of history. In conjunction with the Canadian Jewish Congress
and the B.C. Ministry of Education, the Vancouver Holocaust Education
Centre created teaching guides for teachers of grades 6 and 11.
One of the primary roles of the centre is to bring classes in to
view the various permanent and changing exhibits, for which teaching
guides are also available. For example, Miller said, a recent exhibit
about the Ravensbruck concentration camp was accompanied by a resource
about the experiences of women in the Shoah.
But the work of nonprofit societies like the Holocaust Centre can
go only so far when the teaching of 20th-century history is not
part of a core curriculum, according to a former president of the
B.C. Teachers Federation.
Kit Krieger, who was president of the provincial teachers' organization
from 1997 to 1999 and is now president of the West Vancouver Teachers'
Association, said it is easy for a student to graduate from B.C.
high schools having received no education whatsoever about the Holocaust.
"The only place where there's a certainty that students will
encounter the Holocaust is in History 12, which is an elective,"
said Krieger. Even those who receive some lessons on the Holocaust
may receive massively different amounts.
Krieger said the situation is a result of a confluence of events,
including a 1970s movement toward more teaching of Canadian history,
an emphasis on more choice in education, which has allowed students
to focus on a broad array of subjects to the detriment of what were
once core subjects, and the generalized nature of "learning
outcomes." Teachers in British Columbia are given broad parameters
within which to teach their subjects, with vague objectives which
could be interpreted to demand a few minutes on an aspect of history
or a few weeks, Krieger said.
The loss of universally accepted principles for history education
is worrying to Krieger, a history teacher.
"I think all history is important, but the 20th century is
that history that is so proximate, so near our experience, the one
that perhaps most directly and clearly explains the world in which
we live," he said.
If British Columbians think their education in history doesn't have
an impact on the world, Krieger said, our own history tells a different
story. He cites 20th-century B.C. history as one example of how
local attitudes can have global fallout. The turning away of the
Komagata Maru, a ship filled with Indian asylum-seekers in 1914,
Vancouver riots against Japanese and Chinese Canadians and the refusal
by Canadian authorities to allow the St. Louis, a ship carrying
German Jews, to dock in Canada, are all examples of Canadian attitudes
having broader repercussions.
"These are stories that tell us the consequences, that local
action or local indifference shapes world events," said Krieger.
Because of this, Krieger worries about the lack of province-wide
or national standards governing history education. More than ever,
the B.C. government has, over the past few years, devolved curriculum
decisions to local school boards and individual schools.
Changes in Ontario
This is a trend being seen across the country. Taali Lester-Tollman,
community outreach and campus co-ordinator for the Canadian Friends
of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre for Holocaust Studies, said she was
shocked to learn that 20th-century history is no longer mandatory
in her province of Ontario.
"You're going to end up having high school students graduating
without any concept, context, background, information on the Holocaust,"
she said. "The issue is that most people would agree, that
education is a tool ... in understanding tolerance.... Twentieth-century
history and particularly focusing on the Holocaust is a great jumping
off point to discussing tolerance in society and what lack of tolerance
can lead to, the most horrific consequences of that."
A lack of historical understanding is at least partly to blame,
said Lester-Tollman, for the continuing brutality in the world and
our society's failure to come to terms with it.
"We have this anthem of 'Never Again,' but it's still happening,"
she said. "In Croatia, in Rwanda, now in the Sudan. If they're
not being taught this in school, they have no context for this."
Lester-Tollman also sees the confluence of anti-Zionism taking the
traditional forms of anti-Semitism, abetted by the ignorance of
many of Israel's critics to the recent history that created the
modern Middle East.
"If kids aren't learning anything about 20th-century history
– about why Israel was founded, and the history behind it and
the history of the Middle East and the Ottoman Empire and the British
Mandate," Lester-Tollman said. "If you have no clue of
that, how can you filter out what's truth and what's not truth?"
Pat Johnson is a Vancouver journalist and commentator.
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