What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

Considerations and recommendations
205
As to the conceptual understandings, these might
include students knowing something about:
■■
specific substantive concepts like ‘Nazis’, power
and politics
■ ■‘second-order concepts’ such as causation
(see ‘Introduction to the history chapters’)
■■
other important organising concepts like
‘perpetrators’, ‘victims’ and ‘bystanders’.
To these must be added crucial conceptual frames,
principally the geographies and chronologies of
the Holocaust, both of which are indispensable for
understanding changes and continuities in policy.
This is clearly a long wish list, and simply
‘knowing’ all of the above will by no means ensure
that students are able to construct sophisticated,
nuanced accounts of the Holocaust; the condition
of knowledge and its relationship with understanding
is more complex than this, as has been emphasised
throughout. However, it is reasonable to assume
that acquisition of more developed conceptual
and substantive knowledge will allow students to
recognise and challenge narrow and erroneous
narratives of the Holocaust which circulate in the
broader culture, including in some aspects of the
education system itself. It will also allow them
to understand the Holocaust in deeper and
more profound ways. This will be explored in
the next section.
Of course, it is reasonable to ask how realistic
it is for young people to learn about this important
substantive and conceptual knowledge in the current
educational system. This important question triggers
a number of others that are addressed in later
sections of this chapter, for example:
■■
What continuous professional development (CPD)
do teachers need to help improve students’
knowledge and understanding?
■■
What challenges do they face in terms of
curriculum time and curriculum priorities?
■■
What adjustments in existing practice are required
(in terms of aims, content knowledge and
pedagogical expertise)?
The call for more developed substantive and
conceptual knowledge also raises the question of
age-appropriateness. Later in the chapter, the notion
of progression in students’ learning and the potential
for a spiral curriculum are developed in more detail,
though it is important to say now that this structure
is not intended as a means of students acquiring all
the items listed above at an early age. Instead, their
knowledge and understanding would, with careful
planning, develop and deepen over a period of time
so that most students will acquire key fundamental
knowledge and understanding by aged 14, with
these important fundamentals providing a platform
for students to study the Holocaust in deeper and
more sophisticated ways until aged 18 and beyond.
Other related research on progression of knowledge
under way at the UCL Centre for Holocaust
Education suggests that these hopes are realistic.
How far does the acquisition of specific
knowledge and understanding matter?
It bears repeating that the authors of this report do
not adhere to the idea of historical knowledge as
detached knowledge – that is, as knowledge for
knowledge’s sake. As stated in the introduction to
Part 3, historical knowledge allows for and compels
students to countenance difficult questions and
confront challenging and important issues. The same
line has been advanced by, among others, John
Tosh (2008: ix–x), who has powerfully argued that:
the real value of history lies in equipping young
people with a distinctive mode of thinking which can
be critically applied to the present. Without such a
perspective they will have a greatly impoverished
sense of the possibilities inherent in the present; they
will be unlikely to be able to distinguish between
what is ephemeral and what is enduring in present
circumstances; and the ongoing processes of change
unfolding in their own time will be closed to them.
At a time when the Holocaust has never been
more ‘present’ in contemporary Britain, when
representations of it abound and when its memory is
highly politicised, Tosh’s remarks echo resoundingly.
If our young people are to purposefully ‘think with’
the Holocaust, it follows that key substantive and
conceptual knowledge is a prerequisite.
With this in mind, it is perhaps instructive to
look again at how students make sense of some
of the most important features of the Holocaust
and to outline what the primary implications are for
holding or not holding this knowledge. In this respect
what follows is an analysis of four broad areas of
knowledge and understanding:
1. victims of the Holocaust
2. perpetrators and issues of responsibility
3. space and place in the Holocaust
4. Britain’s role in the Holocaust.
1. Victims of the Holocaust
As Chapter 5 demonstrates students of all ages were
able to recognise that a number of different groups
were subjected to persecution, even murder, by the
Nazi regime. However, the vast majority of students
do not know what, specifically, happened to each
of the victim groups targeted by Nazism, let alone
why they became victims in the first place. Because
www.ioe.ac.uk/holocaust