What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

40
Collective conceptions of the Holocaust
this question, just over half (54.2 per cent) indicated
that they were familiar with the word ‘Holocaust’ but
this figure rose significantly among the Year 8 and
Year 9 students to 78.5 per cent and 90.4 per cent
respectively. By Year 13, 98.3 per cent reported that
they recognised the term.
Of course, it is entirely possible that students
might be conscious – and have conceptions – of the
history we are referring to as ‘the Holocaust’ without
being familiar with that specific word. Accordingly,
those students who completed the online version
of the survey and who indicated that they were not
familiar with the term were subsequently presented
with a short explanatory text:
There was a period in history when Adolf Hitler
was in charge of the Nazi Party who had control
of Germany, and later, other countries. During this
time, various groups of people were discriminated
against and Jews from across Europe were
murdered. This is often called ‘the Holocaust’.
Students completing the online version of the
survey were then asked, ‘Have you heard about any
of this before?’ Of the 956 students who indicated
that they had not recognised the word ‘Holocaust’,
661 (69.1 per cent) reported that they had in fact
heard about this history. Only 295 students, or 4.3
per cent of the 6,931 who completed the online
version of the survey, suggested that they were
unfamiliar with both the word and the history it
describes. Of these, approximately 90 per cent
were still in Year 9 or below at school (40.3 per cent
were in Year 7, 28.1 per cent in Year 8 and 22 per
cent in Year 9).
It is equally possible that students may believe
they recognise the term ‘the Holocaust’ but
understand or interpret it in a manner that is entirely
unrelated to our object of enquiry here. In both the
online and paper versions of the survey, students
who identified that they were familiar with the word
were then invited, in question 30 to ‘describe in
one or two sentences’ what they thought the
Holocaust was.
The responses given to this question will be
examined extensively in later sections of this chapter
but it is significant to note that 6,133 students
attempted to answer this question, 77.1 per cent
of all those who completed the survey. Among
these, only 39 students provided responses that
suggested they had confused or mistaken the word
with another term, for example ‘a church where you
go to pray and forget your sins’ (Year 9 student),
‘Roman central heating’ (Year 7 student), ‘a place
in Scotland where a battle was’ (Year 8 student).
These responses were excluded from further analysis.
The remaining 6,094 students provided answers
relevant enough to suggest that they were to some
degree familiar with the meaning of the Holocaust.
Their contributions thus constituted an appropriate
dataset from which to investigate collective
conceptions of the term.
How did the students in our study most
commonly conceive of the Holocaust?
Examples of the individual responses to survey
question 30 include:
Horrific (Year 10 student).
Genocide (Year 9 student).
Figure 3.1 Recognition of the term ‘Holocaust’ by year group (percentage of students)
Percentages below 5 per cent are not labelled on the chart.
Percentage of students
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100
All students (n=7,661)
73.0
12.5
9.1
5.4
Year 7 (n=1,100)
36.7
17.5
25.7
20.1
Year 8 (n=1,191)
62.0
16.5
14.5
7.0
Year 9 (n=2,717)
76.8
13.6
6.9
Year 10 (n=1,199)
87.1
9.8
Year 11 (n=503)
88.7
7.6
Year 12 (n=570)
90.5
6.1
Year 13 (n=356)
96.1
■ Yes, definitely ■ Yes, I think so ■ No, I don’t think so ■ No, definitely not