What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

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Considerations and recommendations
For all and any with an interest in the ‘future’
of the Holocaust, it is paramount that both the
significant gaps and inaccuracies in students’
knowledge of this history and the limitations of the
dominant, shared collective conceptions upon which
their understanding is likely to draw are recognised
and addressed. Doing so means confronting
underlying issues within Britain’s Holocaust
consciousness more generally. Put simply, there is
a real need, and a pressing urgency, to go beyond
sociocultural narratives that uphold common myths
and misconceptions, perpetuate simplified historical
narratives and unthinkingly use this most traumatic,
most horrific of pasts in the service of various moral
and political agendas in the present day.
Herein lies a critically important role for education
systems and for schools. It is a central contention
of this chapter – indeed of this whole report – that
educational spaces must be found or reclaimed
in which it is possible to critically examine,
deconstruct and challenge many of the core
ideas and assumptions which underpin dominant
contemporary British discourses on the Holocaust.
Chapter 3 suggests that it is perhaps considered
axiomatic that teaching – on any subject – should
begin with, or at least acknowledge, what students
already (think) they know. It is, presumably, equally
uncontentious to assume that one of the central
functions of teaching is then to help students identify
any limitations in their own prior thinking and to build
further, or revise, their knowledge and understanding
from there.
Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 both demonstrated
clearly that students are exposed to the Holocaust
in various and multiple ways before encountering
the subject in the classroom and that their core
conception of what this history is – and what it might
‘mean’ – is shaped in large part by representations
and discourses that circulate outside of schools.
However, it is striking, and sobering, to note that
many of the most common areas of student
misunderstanding remain even among those who
have been formally taught about the Holocaust
within school.
The study was not intended, and cannot serve,
as a basis on which to judge current pedagogical
practice, and our intention is emphatically not to lay
blame at the feet of teachers for errors in student
knowledge and understanding – not least because
they also are likely to be impacted upon by the
wider sociocultural frames identified by Stevick
and Michaels (2013). However, this research does
suggest that the current education system does
not offer an effective or compelling challenge to
the limited and – in too many important respects –
inaccurate popular conceptions of the Holocaust.
Indeed, there appear to be a number of ways in
which schools may unwittingly serve to reproduce
these, for example where a popular but problematic
text such as The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is used
without critical commentary in a classroom context
(see Chapter 4) or, at the level of policymaking,
where what could and should be understood
as the distinctive functions of ‘education’ and
‘commemoration’ are presented as though one
and the same.
To move beyond criticism, the rest of this
chapter considers the implications of key research
findings reported here and recommends appropriate
actions to be taken – by teachers, by those who
support teachers, by policymakers and by future
researchers – so that these might be addressed. The
chapter, therefore, focuses on five key areas and
offers commentary and recommendations on each
one. It begins by considering a central question that
arguably underpins everything in this research:
‘What should young people know and understand
about the Holocaust?’ The ensuing discussions
around specific areas of Holocaust history aim
to explain why some aspects of knowledge and
understanding are especially valuable (so ‘should’
be learned), and lead towards recommendations
for change in planning for teaching and learning
about the Holocaust.
I. Teaching and learning
What should young people know and
understand about the Holocaust?
Given the staggering wealth of academic scholarship
on this vast and complex subject it is, of course,
very difficult to capture in brief and accessible ways
all that is important to know about the Holocaust.
Nevertheless, it is reasonable to assume that
secondary school students need to be able to
draw on both substantive knowledge and informed
conceptual understandings. In terms of the former,
students should know something about:
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the roles of collaborating regimes, Axis allies, and
local populations in the perpetration of genocide
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the long history of anti-Jewish sentiment and
persecution, and the particularities of Nazi
antisemitism
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who ‘the Jews’ were, where they came from and
the nature of European Jewish experiences prior
to, during and after the Holocaust
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the specific policies enacted against the various
victim groups targeted by Nazism and how these
related to ideology
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knowledge and responses of Britain and the Allies
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how the Holocaust ended, its legacy, significance
and impact.