Daniel Feldman (daniel.feldman@yadvashem.org.il) is a member of the faculty at Yad Vashem’s International School for Holocaust Studies. Please view the accompanying article, “The Story of Jewish Life: Yad Vashem’s Approach to Teaching the Shoah” here.
“Children are not stupid. The fools among them are not more numerous than among adults. How often it occurs that we, embellished by our years, impose on children mindless, uncritical demands that will never be realized. Dumbfounded, the intelligent child all too frequently stands opposite incessant, lazy, condescending stupidity … Let us respect [children’s] attempts to find knowledge.” – Janusz Korczak, 1919
How do we avoid the twin pitfalls of teaching the Shoah? On the one hand, as educators we instinctively want to shelter children from the sort of cruelty epitomized by the Shoah. On the other hand, we bear responsibility for educating mature children who are aware of the full scope of human and Jewish experience, which ineluctably includes some very ugly chapters. We seek to strike a delicate balance, neither traumatizing children nor committing the patronizing fallacy of Billy Collins’s “History Teacher,” who, while “Trying to protect his students’ innocence,” told them that “The Spanish Inquisition was nothing more / than an outbreak of questions” and “The War of the Roses took place in a garden”; meanwhile, coddled children bully each other in the playground (see full poem below).
Holocaust educators are divided on the issue of when to begin Holocaust education. In spirited debates, some scholars of early education advocate an approach that sensitively prepares children for Holocaust study by teaching them a preliminary lesson about tolerance, prejudice, loss, and death (Sepinwall, 1999; Schweber 2008). Other educational experts passionately disagree. Samuel Totten (1999) rejects both the “preparatory version” of Holocaust pre-education as too vague to count as learning about the Shoah and the full encounter with the Holocaust as too complex and overwhelming for young children.
At Yad Vashem’s International School for Holocaust Studies we understand the merit behind both positions, and have formulated a third approach: an age-appropriate Holocaust curriculum that incrementally introduces the Shoah to students according to their developing emotional and cognitive abilities. The approach calls for an early start to Holocaust education that deals with the factual history of the Shoah even in early grades, but in a way that accommodates the capacities of young children. This approach scaffolds knowledge about the Shoah in a spiral model of Holocaust education: values such as individual empathy and family bonds are communicated to students from the youngest ages through primary school; junior high students are taught communal dilemmas and questions of ethnic identity; and only in high school do students grapple with more complex social subjects of advanced historical comprehension, including processes of cause-and-effect, national ideology, and multifaceted global conflict. The spiral model moves from individual to community and finally to society while relying on a safe but principled accumulation of knowledge about the Holocaust itself.
“Safe” initial contact with Holocaust learning entails studying historically rooted stories about Jewish children and their families during the Shoah. The content of these age-appropriate stories should focus on family ties and children’s nascent sense of themselves as unique individuals. Of equal importance is that these first lessons about the Shoah be delivered by trusted educators familiar to the students so that the Holocaust not become a foreign or “special” learning unit divorced from the regular curriculum. For that reason, young students should not be brought to Holocaust museums (which are in any case unsuitable for young students) for their first engagement with the Shoah.
The stories related to students at younger ages should end in survival and ideally rescue. While critics might claim that “happy endings” distort Shoah history by teaching the historical exception (survival) rather than rule (murder), an early start to Holocaust education leaves ample time for students to confront the appalling extent of the atrocity later in their schooling. A late start that introduces Holocaust education in adolescence, by contrast, nearly guarantees that students will never be able to contend with the magnitude of the event.
Our advocacy for age-appropriate, gradual, but authentic Holocaust instruction beginning in the earliest grades stems from experience that has led us to heed the call of noted pre-war Polish-Jewish educational theorist and Holocaust martyr Janusz Korczak to respect children’s intelligence. Contemporary Jewish students discover traces of Holocaust memory one way or another far earlier than protective parents or guardians might wish. Without an expert and sensitive educational hand guiding that encounter, children create their own piecemeal mythologies and misconceptions about the Holocaust. The alternative to responsible dissemination of knowledge – forced ignorance – is as unacceptable and demeaning to children today as it seemed to Korczak in July 1942 when he decided, against the wishes of other Warsaw Ghetto leaders, to have the children in his orphanage stage a play preparing them for their fate. Children can face the truth when it is transmitted with care. Our challenge as educators is to have the courage to do so.
References:
Collins, B. (2002). “The History Teacher.” Sailing Alone Around the Room. New York: Random House.
Schweber, S. (2008). “What Happened to Their Pets?”: Third Graders Encounter the Holocaust. Teachers College Record Volume, 10(10), 2073–2115.
Sepinwall, H. (1999). Incorporating Holocaust education into K–4 curriculum and teaching in the United States, Social Sciences and the Young Learner, 11(3), 58-61.
Totten, S. (1999). Should there be Holocaust education for K–4 students? The answer is no. Social Sciences and the Young Learner, 12(1), 36–39.