What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

Collective conceptions of the Holocaust
59
for persecution, or where ‘Asians’, ‘Muslims’ and
‘Hindus’ were specifically named as victims of
the regime.
It is not only students’ schemata for the Holocaust
that are relevant in this context. Where students are
encouraged to interpret the history of the Holocaust
through a vocabulary of generic notions such as
‘racism’, ‘prejudice’ and/or ‘difference’, they are likely
to draw upon wider understandings of what those
same terms mean to them within the context of
the present day.
Again, these observations should not be
interpreted foremost as evidence of students’ faulty
thinking. As Chapter 5 outlines in considerable
detail, the Nazi’s historically contingent fusion of
racialised nationalism, antisemitism and eugenics
was a complex construction that was inconsistently
articulated; it is far from simple to understand
let alone to explain succinctly. Something of this
complexity was implicitly acknowledged by a handful
of students whose descriptions directly confronted
a common confusion, for example: ‘Hitler attempted
to end the Jew race, however he was wrong as they
were a religion not a race’ (Year 12 student). The
broader point however is that a generalised notion of
‘prejudice’ against generic ‘difference’ – as appears
to circulate widely – is unlikely to help students
identify, let alone grapple with, such complexity.
Figure 3.12 Responses to question 69, ‘Have you
ever learned about the Holocaust at school?’
7.8
8.8
15.1
6.4
61.9
Percentage of students
■ Yes, definitely ■ Yes, I think so ■ Maybe
■ No, I don’t think so ■ Definitely not
How might students’ collective
conceptions relate to wider discursive
framings and to educational encounters
with the Holocaust?
Where do the collective conceptions of the
Holocaust that have been charted on the preceding
pages come from? As educators, we might hope
that the taught content delivered in school and
through extracurricular educational encounters have
significant impact upon student understanding but,
as has already been outlined in Chapter 1, we know
that representations of the Holocaust also circulate
extensively within popular culture and wider society.
Question 69 of the survey asked students if they
had already learned about the Holocaust within
school. A total of 7,339 students answered this
question and, as Figure 3.12 indicates, 77 per cent
reported that they thought, or were sure, they had.
Chapter 4 will examine the detail of students’
reported educational encounters with the Holocaust.
However, it is instructive to consider here the 15.1
per cent – or 1,112 students – who reported that
they had not learned about the Holocaust while
at school. When asked if they had ever seen or
heard the word ‘Holocaust’ before, 34.7 per cent
of these students said they definitely had, 19.4 per
cent thought they had, 26.1 per cent did not think
they had, and 19.8 per cent said they definitely had
not. However, when students completing the online
version of the survey were then presented with the
short explanation below, more than half of those
unfamiliar with the word ‘Holocaust’ said they were in
fact aware of this history:
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’.
In total, more than 80 per cent of students who
had never learned about the Holocaust at school
were nonetheless familiar with either the term
‘Holocaust’ or its related history.
It is possible to offer a tentative comparative
analysis of students’ collective conceptions of the
Holocaust prior to formal school-based learning.
Table 3.3 shows the ten words or phrases most
commonly used across 396 descriptions provided
by students from Years, 7, 8 and 9 who had not
yet been taught about the Holocaust in school. By
way of comparison, the table also reproduces the
words most commonly used by the full cohort of
students from each of these three year groups, as
seen in Table 3.2. One hundred and seventy-three
descriptions from the subsample of those coded
www.ioe.ac.uk/holocaust