What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

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Considerations and recommendations 219 and those who survived. Many Holocaust education organisations see commemoration as one of their primary goals, and it is clear from our research that young people and their teachers across the country understand and value the importance of commemoration. In this sense, the findings of this research can be seen as reassuring. Young people are overwhelmingly convinced of the importance and significance of what they understand to be the Holocaust. They speak movingly, for example, of the power of meeting a survivor, and the vast majority believe that the Holocaust is something that all young people should learn about. So it may appear that memorialisation and the place of the Holocaust in students’ collective consciousness are secure, at least for the coming generation. However, to adopt such a complacent position would be to misinterpret some of the key findings of this research. Two principal issues are salient here. The first centres on the question of whether it is possible to commemorate something in meaningful ways without a full appreciation of what is being commemorated. The findings of this research reveal that many students do not know about some of the most important elements of the Holocaust, so that legitimate questions remain regarding how far that memory is secure and meaningful. How secure, for example, is Holocaust memory if students: ■■ don’t know more about the people who they are commemorating? ■■ don’t really understand why and how the Holocaust happened? ■■ don’t understand the catastrophic impact of the Holocaust on millions of individuals and broader European society and culture? The possibility that memory could be based on shaky and shallow historical foundations is one that should concern us all. Of course, this is not to undermine the special importance of Holocaust commemoration. Rather, it is a call for those working in the field of Holocaust education to consider ways in which knowledge, understanding and memory can be more robustly related. The argument here is not to replace commemoration but to strengthen and deepen it. The challenge is to pursue a new framing that both emphasises the testing of common knowledge (which is often based upon myths and misconceptions) against the historical record and seeks to bring the insights of historiographical scholarship into the public arena. In this respect Schweber and Findling (2007: 275) argue that, for remembering to be authentic, the Holocaust needs to be understood in greater depth and complexity: While it may be comforting for us to shape Holocaust memory, commemoration and education efforts around heroes, survivors, optimism and hope, ultimately the Holocaust must remembered in all of its tragedy and in all of its complexity. Only then can dignified commemoration be offered in memory of the millions of voiceless victims whose stories never reached us. The second issue warranting attention is acknowledgment that an important distinction must be made between commemoration and learning. Chapter 1 argues that commemorating a past event is not the same as grappling with the complexities of why it happened. Accordingly, while participation in memorial acts and events is very important, educators must move beyond this commemorative function and help students develop deeper and more profound understandings of the Holocaust. Indeed, the classroom should become a space where young people construct their own meanings of this complex past and reflect more critically upon the present memorial culture. Ultimately, such an approach will allow students to think more deeply about the past in order to better consider the significance that others place upon it in the present. This research reveals that students’ knowledge and understanding of the Holocaust is often limited and narrow. It could be argued, therefore, that empty commemoration of a subject which often appears as vague and ambiguous to young people has no merit. As such, the findings of this research suggest that perhaps one of the most important aims of Holocaust education should be to deepen young people’s knowledge and understanding of this history in order to develop their own independent capacity for critical thinking. Armed with such an education it is possible that young people will be equipped to construct meaning for themselves, weigh the truth claims of others and critically evaluate (and potentially support) commemoration of the Holocaust. It is also notable that publication of this research coincides with key recommendations in the Prime Minister’s Holocaust Commission Report to establish a ‘striking and prominent new National Memorial’ and a ‘World-Class Learning Centre’ in central London (Cabinet Office 2015: 13), both exciting and potentially powerful developments. In this regard it is significant that, throughout their report, the Commission noted their concern over many of the emerging findings from our study and recognised the need for deeper knowledge and understanding if this memory is to be secure and meaningful. In the light of our research findings, it is of immense importance that the ‘Learning Centre’ and the ‘National Memorial’ are regarded as symbiotic developments and that critical attention is paid www.ioe.ac.uk/holocaust
220 Considerations and recommendations to ensuring they are both underpinned by robust and research-informed considerations. It is also important that these developments do not support and perpetuate existing and narrowly framed conceptions of the Holocaust so prevalent in contemporary culture. Learning lessons from the Holocaust Arguably the most common and repeated rationale for teaching and learning about the Holocaust is that its study provides lessons for students in contemporary society. The proposition that a study of the past can provide straightforward ‘lessons’ for the present is problematic for a number of reasons. Prominent among these is the dubious notion that the specific and contingent historical context of any previous era can provides ‘lessons’ for a very different contemporary world. As the Holocaust historian and educator Wolf Kaiser (2010:39) neatly summarises, ‘we should not try to deduce from historical examples a set of rules of conduct that are universally applicable … history encourages reflection, but it does not provide signposts for the right way to go in a quickly changing world’. Similarly, the historian Tim Cole (2004: 54) shares a sceptical view of using the Holocaust in the quest for simple moral lessons: There is … a place for questioning broader contemporary concerns with the Holocaust that reduce its complexity to a number of simplistic moral lessons. To do so is not to suggest that the Holocaust is unimportant, but rather that it is too important to be reduced to the sentimental and moralistic. An additional problem in using the complexities of the Holocaust as a means to provide universal lessons and simplify understandings in the present is that it may lose its distinctive educational value. Arguably, what makes the study of the Holocaust so important is its particular nature and historical distinctiveness. After all, while racism, xenophobia and fear of ‘the other’ is often a feature of all societies, genocide is not. An imperative exists, then, to know and understand more deeply about why and how the Holocaust happened in a particular historical context and in a particular time and place. In defence of those individuals and organisations who advance the idea of ‘lessons’ from the Holocaust, one might generously suggest that the use of the term is shorthand for a more sophisticated process whereby the study of the past offers more nuanced perspective on the present. Even so, whether the term ‘perspective’ or ‘lessons’ is invoked an essential problem remains which, again, relates to issues of knowledge and understanding. For, if students are even to begin to ‘learn lessons’ (or make meaning) from the Holocaust, it is imperative that they have a robust and secure understanding of it as a historical phenomenon. Without such knowledge it is impossible for students to derive any legitimate ‘lessons’ or understanding from the past. Unfortunately, the findings of this study suggest that levels of knowledge and understanding among students are often deeply problematic. By extension, it is unlikely that they will be able to draw any meaningful lessons or perspective from the past. For example: ■■ If students believe that only Hitler (and possibly a core group of Nazis) were responsible for the Holocaust, how can they understand how and why the Holocaust happened? And how can they begin to assess the implications of knowing that ‘ordinary’ people across Europe became complicit in genocide? ■■ If students do not know about the scope and scale of the Holocaust, how can they consider the devastating impact it had on Jews and other victims and the implications of this for modern society? ■■ If students see the Holocaust in German-centric ways and don’t appreciate its geographical and chronological development, how can they understand how genocide took root, evolved and became more radicalised? And, without this knowledge, how can they begin to consider the implications of this for the contemporary world? If students are to make sense of the Holocaust their understanding must be based on sufficient enabling knowledge. A simple recourse to ‘learning lessons’ has no value if students do not have an intelligent understanding of what the Holocaust was and why it happened. Fundamentally, this research demonstrates the importance of moving away from a lessons-focused approach in Holocaust education towards one that provides students with a deeper understanding of a complex past through ongoing critical reflection and the search for more profound meanings. It also requires that education goes beyond easy moral lessons and engages with the deeply unsettling flaws in our modern world from which the Holocaust sprang. Ultimately, it involves students’ thinking critically about how and why the Holocaust happened in an ostensibly modern, educated, European society, and intelligently considering the implications of this stark reality for contemporary society.
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CENTRE FOR HOLOCAUST EDUCATION What
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What do students know and understan
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iv About the UCL Centre for Holocau
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vi Foreword by Sir Peter Bazalgette
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viii Foreword by Professor Yehuda B
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2 Executive summary ■■ Many stu
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Olivia Hemingway, 2014
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8 Introduction ■■ What forms of
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10 Introduction the fate of the Jew
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12 Introduction two reasons here in
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14 Introduction Figure 1.1 Variatio
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16 Introduction Holocaust are never
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18 Introduction ■■ the inclusio
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20 Introduction ■■ The chapter
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24 Methodology Of particular note w
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26 Methodology were asked questions
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28 Methodology Vocabulary test We e
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30 Methodology Table 2.2 Breakdown
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32 Methodology Focus group details
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34 Methodology How were the focus-g
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38 Collective conceptions of the Ho
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102 Preface often socially construc
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Emile Holba, 2014
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106 Who were the victims? students
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108 Who were the victims? Figure 5.
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Page 236 and 237: Appendix 1: The Survey 225 Appendix
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Page 246 and 247: Appendix 1: The Survey 235 42. Who
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Page 270 and 271: References 259 Assmann, A. (2010)
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Page 274 and 275: References 263 Emler, N. and Ohana,
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References 269 Resnick, L.B. (1989)
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References 271 Snyder, T. (2009)
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References 273 Yeager, E., Anderson
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Centre for Holocaust Education UCL
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What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

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