What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

Introduction
15
in any society’ and ‘To learn the lessons of the
Holocaust and to ensure that a similar human
atrocity never happens again’ as among their top
three (see Figure 1.1, page 9).
It could, perhaps, be reasonably assumed that the
decision to place the Holocaust within the secondary
school history curriculum was not an arbitrary one
and that policymakers intended the subject to be
approached, at least in the first instance, through
a disciplinary historical lens. If that were the case,
policymakers might be frustrated that so few
teachers prioritised the aims, ‘To deepen knowledge
of the Second World War and twentieth-century
history’, ‘To understand and explain the actions of
people involved in and affected by an unprecedented
historical event’ and ‘To explore questions about the
foundations of Western civilisation’. And yet, as the
following pages will argue, teachers’ concerns to
draw out contemporary, broadly antiracist lessons
from this history are entirely compatible with – and
may themselves be fed by – the way in which
the Holocaust is regularly framed politically.
‘Britain’s promise to remember’: The
Holocaust, education and British national
imaginaries
Ensuring that the memory and the lessons of the
Holocaust are never forgotten lies at the heart of
Britain’s values as a nation. In commemorating the
Holocaust, Britain remembers the way it proudly
stood up to Hitler and provided a home to tens of
thousands of survivors and refugees, including almost
10,000 children who came on the Kindertransports.
In debating the more challenging elements of Britain’s
history – such as the refusal to accept more refugees
or the questions over whether more could have been
done to disrupt the Final Solution – Britain reflects
on its responsibilities in the world today. In educating
young people about the Holocaust, Britain reaffirms
its commitment to stand up against prejudice and
hatred in all its forms. The prize is empathetic citizens
with tolerance for the beliefs and cultures of others.
But eternal vigilance is needed to instil this in every
generation (Cabinet Office 2015: 9).
Benedict Anderson (1991) famously coined the
phrase ‘imagined community’ to emphasise the
manner in which disparate groups and otherwise
unconnected individuals are encouraged to perceive
themselves as bound together in a nation through
multiple symbolic and rhetorical devices rather than
through actual familial or otherwise concrete practical
ties. Articulations of the past are crucial here; for as
Seixas (2004: 5) notes and many have argued, there
is a self-evident and essential relationship between
notions of memory and identity – whether that of an
individual or of a collective such as ‘the nation’ (see
also Olick 2003 and Smith 1999).
Again, education has a profoundly important role
to play in this respect. As Gellner (1983), Green
(2013) and others have argued, public education
was one of the founding pillars of the modern
nation-state (see also Lowe 1999), and the history
curriculum in particular a principle platform through
which constructions of the national story could be
told (Tormey 2006; Grosevnor and Lawn 2001).
However, the temporally and spatially bound notion
of a nation or national collective has always been
problematic (Benhabib 2005; Hobsbawm 1990), and
has increasingly been challenged by the proliferation
of global movement of both people and ideas (see,
for example, Held and McGrew 2003; Appadurai
1996). The way we imagine ourselves in the twentyfirst
century is no longer – if it ever was – fixed
simply to a national frame (Gupta and Ferguson
1992). Transnational forms of identification, and of
‘remembering’, are being increasingly articulated
and, as Levy and Sznaider (2002; 2006) and
Alexander (2003) have identified, representations
of the Holocaust are pivotal within these (see also
Pakier and Stråth 2010).
As Bell (2009: 253) helpfully summarises,
Alexander (2003) ‘traces how the Holocaust
became “the dominant symbolic representation of
evil” during the second half of the twentieth century’
and goes on to suggest that ‘this historical process
underpins the development of a supranational
moral universalism’ aimed at attempting to ‘reduce
the probability of such events occurring again’.
For Levy and Sznaider (2002), the global spread of
a shared discursive framing of the Holocaust – as a
yardstick for international politics and transnational
values – serves as the foundation of what they
term ‘cosmopolitan memory’. Essentially, across
different national contexts, the Holocaust is foremost
presented in terms of its universal lessons and as
‘a traumatic event for all of humankind’ (Alexander
2003: 28).
In actual fact, as in most nuanced analyses of the
wider ‘globalisation debate’, global impulses never
entirely displace the national (Held and McGrew
2003; Hirst and Thompson 1999). Rather, there
is a dialectic relationship between transnational
and national imaginaries, and sensibilities. In a
striking illustration of this, the current section of our
discussion opened with a statement taken from
the final report produced by the Prime Minister’s
Holocaust Commission. In it, the values of tolerance
and of vigilance against prejudice are articulated
directly with reference to commemoration of the
Holocaust and against a specifically British frame:
‘Ensuring that the memory and the lessons of the
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