The Holocaust UK Curriculum

I received this chain e-mail today. All kinds of misinformation can now be sent all over the world quite quickly and and without much if any cost. I haven't researched this, but I know that the European Union has passed a law making it a crime to deny the Holocaust. The UK is a part of the European Union.

Our UK members, please inform us on what REALLY is going on in UK school curriculum concerning the Holocaust. I'm convinced this is bull shit, but I don't have proof as of yet.

In Memoriam
>
> Recently this week, the UK removed The Holocaust from its school curriculum
> because it "offended" the Moslem population which claims it never occurred.
>
> This is a frightening portent of the fear that is gripping the world and how
> easily each country is giving into it.
>
> It is now more than 60 years after the Second World War in Europe ended.
> This e-mail is being sent as a memorial chain, in memory of the six million
> Jews, 20 million Russians, 10 million Christians and 1,900 Catholic
> priests who were murdered, massacred, raped, burned, starved and
> humiliated with the German and Russia peoples looking the other way!
> Now, more than ever, with Iran, among others, claiming the Holocaust to be
> "a myth," it is imperative to make sure the world never forgets.
> This e-mail is intended to reach 40 million people worldwide!
> Join us and be a link in the memorial chain and help us distribute it around the world.
> Please send this e-mail to people you know and ask them to continue the memorial chain.
> Please don't delete, it will only take you a minute to pass this on.
>
>
>
>

Freddie:

Snopes.com has this one covered and was just recently posted on April 17th.

Urban Legends Reference Pages: Holocaust Teaching Ban in the UK

Willi

It sounds like chain letter nonsense to me.After the part we played in World War 2 it's highly unlikely that any aspect of it will ever be off the agenda.
School only comprises a small part of education anyway.I learnt far more once I got out of the school gates.The books I read were definitely not part of the school curriculum.

The hinted Snopes conclusion is hardly justified by the story on that page. Despite the appearance of nice comforting words there like "compulsory", it admits that at least one school is known to be avoiding that little bit of history. Out of how many schools examined, it doesn't say. The explanation presented there is not inconsistent with the "rumor", except that "UK removed The Holocaust from its school curriculum" should be "Major chunks of the UK don't require The Holocaust to be included in the school curriculum." Is that really much of an improvement?

I understand the British academic jailed (by ex Austrian nazis and their descendants) for questioning the holocaust figures was pilloried for a simple and rigorous historical questioning of the cliometrics. Two bads do not make a good but the Turkish and Japanese governments have not apologized for the atrocities they visited upon Christians. One race does not have more of a claim on our sympathies than another. Wickedness has no exuse, however I am not aware that the Islamicist lobby in the UK is the reason for any alteration in school curriculum. The charge seems spurious and suspiciously propagandist.

It's been a long time since I was at school but the events of the war were covered so thouroughly and so often on tv that it didn't need to be taught in school.
The regular screening of Spielberg's holocaust movie will have a bigger impact on kids than anything a teacher says on the subject.So if any school isn't doing their job properly the information will still get through.

When stated like this it makes sense to me.

Dad's Army will come to the rescue of a lazy, incompetent, or terminally PC pedagogy?

The situation may be more dire than I'd realized.

Really? If the Holocaust is taken out of the curriculum in a school because a segment of the population doesn't believe it exists, then it is unlikely the the parents of that group are going to teach it and that subculture group will continue to spread false information to the people of that subculture.

As a retired social studies teacher, I am appalled when a group of history teachers together as a group decide not to teach about a certain piece of history, especially a major piece of history that happened within the lifetimes of some people still alive.

Well, we do it here too. The main problem is that people are too stupid to understand the difference between stating facts and hurling insults. Many of our schools no longer include works by authors as simple as Mark Twain because they contain the "N" word. Well, that word existed and it's a part of our history. To not understand that is to not understand how our cultural attitiudes developed. Any change we decide to make now will be because of our past decisions, not in spite of them.

Holocaust deniers are one far-out lot, but the silent majority might be the real killer. If the majority says nothing for fear of being offensive, and the few spew misinformation, it does leave one with a substantially difficult task of discovering the truth on one's own, most people probably wouldn't bother. It was closer to my generation, a few more removed, and it could be seriously downplayed even in this relatively short period of time.

Just like here- we heard exaggerated rumors of high school teachers teaching creationism as fact, and we all went nuts. Then we found out it was one particular school, and we felt much better. Then a few more stories surfaced, and we realised that the original rumour, while a bit hysterical sounding, was pretty accurate to begin with. I'd say there's probably some truth to this one in the UK as well. It's probably always been like this as far as how history has been reported, I'd imagine a good bit of the things I take as true today are someone's spin from years gone by.

I'll have a look into this further Freddie.

But one of my clearest memories from school is watching harrowing footage of the death camps. We all watched it.

Here you go

Schools drop Holocaust lessons to avoid offence-News-UK-Education-TimesOnline

I knew it would be the teachers fault ;-)

So far as I can tell it's hype. It's still on the National Curriculum as a mandatory subject to be taught at KS3 in QCA Unit 19 (along with others). That said, this really only applies to state schools, independent schools may vary their curriculum.

It's quite likely that 'faith' schools will be very 'selective' about whether they teach certain subjects and more worryingly how they teach them. This is one reason why I'm so opposed to them; not so much in principle (I went to one) but in practice; today they seem ever more to be sources of social division rather than education.

I think there is a very real danger of diluting the subject, and others such as slavery for the reasons stated in the OP, I say danger because by diluting Humankind's darkest hours, and worse one still within living memory of it's occurence is an offront to it's victims and sidesteps the repercussions and divisions which are still deeply entrenched in many of today's societies.

If such dilutions are allowed to invade our classrooms in 50 years the Gulf war(s) may be portrayed as triumphs of liberation, freeing oppressed peoples as opposed to being, largely squalid politically and personally motivated campaigns aimed, primarily at bolstering personal egos and protecting access to a certain natural rescourse. Call me a cynic, I've been called worse.

My personal experience was that while we aren't actually taught anything about the holocaust as a defined subject, WW2 is obviously a huge part of our curriculum and from that we learn about it.

Through our studies of WW2 we're taught about concentration camps, told the story of Anne Frank, what the regime stood for etc etc. and things are just 'picked up'. (This was around 4-5 years ago)

I don't know a single person who I'm not related to who has watched Schindler's List, which I find more fascinating than any discrepancies in our curriculum.

While not true of the UK cirriculum as a whole I'm still disturbed that it's true for even one school. Will they next cut evolution to avoid conflict with creationist teachings?

I think the key to avoiding offence when teaching history is to teach it without characterization. Are the techers unable to convey the events without assigning good guy or bad guy roles to the parties involved?

Facts are facts, whether we're comfortable with them or not.

I've heard the idea mooted...

I think that in part that's probably the reason. I do appreciate it's hard to paint Hitler (in this instance) as other than a baddie but then that's the skill of teaching.

From experience I've found some facts are more....factual than others, or at lest more palatable.