If Holocaust education in U.S. public schools is to live up to the commitment of “never again,” some experts believe teaching the subject hand in hand with other genocides is what enables such efforts to influence future generations.
Linda Milstein, a volunteer at CChange, one of the many Holocaust centers providing materials, consultations, resources and training to educators in New Jersey, says state-level Holocaust education requirements in America can work to “hopefully prevent [genocides] from happening in the future.
“If we want to try to prevent genocides and major abuses of human rights from happening, then the Holocaust becomes the exemplar of how a genocide developed and was carried out, and the effect that it had,” she said.
But having a state-level mandate does not ensure that this material becomes a substantive part of K-12 education. Individual educators are tasked with creating classes, and funds must be allotted for pre-service and in-service teacher education, curricular development, coordination and assessment.
A recently passed Pennsylvania bill represents a compromise: The state department of education will develop curricular options using Holocaust professionals, which will be distributed to the state’s public schools. For schools that decide to use these options, the state will pay for teachers to be trained and the teachers will get continuing education credits. Then, two years after implementation, the state board of education will do a study: If fewer than 90 percent of schools are teaching the subjects, then the board will require that all schools teach them.
New Jersey, the state that likely has had the greatest success in mandated Holocaust education, got an early boost from former governor Thomas Kean, whose father was one of the few U.S. Representatives who protested the ban on Jewish immigration to the U.S. from Nazi Germany. Kean set up New Jersey’s Holocaust Council through an executive order in 1982, and the state legislature funded it at $125,000.
Illinois passed the first U.S. Holocaust education mandate in 1990, and in 2005 it was extended to include other genocides. But the mandate is unfunded, leaving organizations such as the Illinois Holocaust Museum, which was instrumental in getting the mandate passed, to do what it can to fill in the gap. The museum runs professional development trainings on the Holocaust and genocide. — jns.org