What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

Considerations and recommendations
203
8.
Considerations and recommendations
Introduction
As the opening chapter of this report emphasises,
at the point of writing, representations of the
Holocaust proliferate within popular and political
consciousness in the UK. Critically, the Holocaust
continues to occupy a central position in the formal
National Curriculum for England’s secondary schools.
While the power of a single curriculum has been
weakened considerably in recent years (as will be
discussed below) ‘the Holocaust’ is positioned,
symbolically at least, as part of the canon of valued
and valuable knowledge that successive Westminster
governments have judged important for the nation’s
school students to acquire.
In as far as it is able to demonstrate that England’s
secondary school students do indeed know
something of this history, elements of the research
reported in previous chapters could be interpreted
as ‘good news’. Overwhelmingly, the students who
took part in this study recognised the term ‘the
Holocaust’, and the majority most clearly associated
it with the persecution and mass murder of Jews or
were at least familiar with this history. Moreover, they
appeared to place great value upon learning about
the Holocaust and expressed high levels of interest
in engaging with the subject both inside and beyond
school. This offers a strong counter to any claim that
there could be a widespread sense of over-exposure,
‘fatigue’ or even resistance among students towards
encountering the Holocaust in classroom contexts.
On the contrary, even those students who had
already learned about the Holocaust at school
regularly reported that they wanted to learn more.
However, beyond these general levels of
awareness, interest and enthusiasm, the preceding
chapters also documented several concerning
gaps, confusions and significant inaccuracies in
the accounts and responses that most students
were able to provide. There is, therefore, a crucial
caveat to the ‘good news’ that students consider it
important to learn about the Holocaust given that, as
this research suggests, many continue to operate
with significantly truncated – and in some cases
inaccurate – understandings of the Holocaust even
after they have learned about it.
In reflecting on this, it is helpful to remember the
words of caution sounded by Stevick and Michaels
(2013: 11) earlier in this report: that while erroneous
understandings and common misconceptions are
important to document, ‘[l]ittle is accomplished by
criticizing people, particularly students, for where
they are when that location is broadly determined
by the broader culture’.
For this reason, Chapter 1 attempted to characterise
the wider context of Holocaust consciousness
in contemporary Britain since this broader culture is
likely to inform the students’ perspectives. In particular,
it suggested that most dominant popular and
political framings placed an emphasis upon memory
and commemoration and on drawing universal,
present-oriented and/or redemptive ‘lessons’ to be
learned in place of critical engagement with this most
challenging, complex and confronting history.
Employing the notion of ‘collective conceptions’,
Chapter 3 offered a wide-angle overview of
students’ overarching frameworks for understanding
the Holocaust. On the basis of short, free-text
descriptions volunteered by the students who
completed the research survey, a clear and
remarkably consistent core collective conception of
the Holocaust was discerned. Across all year groups,
students overwhelmingly prioritised the identification
of an action or series of actions (most commonly
‘killing’, ‘murdering’ or ‘taking to concentration
camps’) committed by named perpetrators (most
commonly ‘Hitler’ and/or ‘the Nazis’) upon named
victims (most commonly ‘the Jews’).
Students were considerably less likely to explicitly
position these actions and agents within a specific
geographical or temporal frame. Where such
references were made, they were almost invariably
restricted to ‘the Second World War’ and ‘Germany’.
Critically, it was noted that the emphases – and
related absences – most commonly reflected in
students’ core conceptions were consistent with the
forms of contemporary Holocaust consciousness
characterised in Chapter 1 and, moreover, that
they foreshadowed many of the most striking and
significant confusions, misunderstandings and gaps
in student knowledge and understanding that were
examined in detail in the later chapters of this report.
www.ioe.ac.uk/holocaust