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Historical Association and former Head of History at Netherhall School, Cambridge,
questioned a group of history teachers about how they taught the Holocaust and their replies
emphasised moral, social and spiritual lessons to be drawn from studying it. He argued that
the problem with these objectives was that they were ‘ a dangerously non-historical set of
assumptions’ (Kinloch, 1998, p.44-5). Kinloch said that teaching about the Holocaust should
start and end with what happened and why’ (Kinloch, 1998, p.46). His argument explicitly
focuses on teaching historical attributes and attempts to exclude a social and moral dimension.
This was challenged by Haydn, History Education Lecturer at the University of East Anglia
(Haydn, 2000) who considered that teaching social and moral education justified teaching the
Holocaust. Nevertheless, he stressed that studying the Holocaust should be underpinned by
raising historical questions and human experiences in order to produced a reasoned
understanding about what took place.
A similar case was made by Salmons, Holocaust Education Co-ordinator at the Imperial War
Museum, who considered that moral issues arise from teaching the Holocaust because it
reflects crimes committed by ordinary men and women. In response to correspondence with
Russell he argued that ‘ Rather than being a panacea for racism, prejudice and other social
skills, studying the Holocaust was likely to show the complexities of these issues and that
there are no easy answers’(Russell, 2006, p.38). He appreciated that history could support
student reflection on their own role in society but felt that it was not the role of teachers to
shape history in order that they arrived at the same conclusions as themselves (Russell, 2006,
p.126).