The Great White North - Ch. 10 Question 4

How is the Holocaust taken up in the curriculum? How does teaching about the Holocaust compare to teaching about Israel? About Palestinians and the Middle East? About other genocides? The Great White North Paul R. Carr, Darren E. Lund (Eds) p.44

My experience has been that the holocaust is a subject that is deeply engrained in education, especially when dealing with issues of human rights. While it is essential to teach about the holocaust, I feel that, in some ways, the intense focus we have on that moment in history blinds us in some ways to what is going on in the present. The subject is always approached with a “we must remember so we don’t repeat” mindset, which ignores the fact that we ARE repeating, that genocide is not simply an issue of the past. I remember in school we would have entire lesson plans dedicated to teaching about the holocaust – films, reports, lectures, speakers, and yet, I only remember once in junior high, hearing about the Rwandan Genocide. Virtually everything I know about Israel, Palestinians, the Rwandan Genocide, and other such issues I learned through sources outside the classroom until I reached university.

It is unnerving to me that we focus on one event to such an extent that we greatly overlook many issues facing us today. Yes, it is important to learn from the past, but in order to do that we need to remember to address the present. Our children need to be reminded that these issues are relevant to what is going on in their lifetime and are not only found in textbooks and films. I believe that our focus on the Holocaust has a lot to do with the fact that it took place in a white European nation. It is easy for us to look at the Middle East or Africa and feel distanced from the violence because we think of them as different from ourselves. We assume that certain places are predisposed to those sorts of problems, so it doesn’t jolt our sense of security quite as much. It is, however, easy for us to relate to Germany and, thus, to feel more personally effected by and threatened by what happened; it seems “unnatural” to us that such an event would take place there. It is unfortunate, but it really does represent the blanket of racism and how it affects our thinking as a nation, often subtlety and subconsciously.