What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

62
Collective conceptions of the Holocaust
people with disabilities and those that students
themselves identify as ‘Gypsies’ among those who
had learned about the Holocaust reflect a relatively
small shift in thinking, it also indicates a potential
influence of schooling. Furthermore, none of the
figures presented above can tell us anything about
how much each group of students actually knew
or understood in relation to the words and
phrases used.
It would also be a mistake to over emphasise
a distinction between the notion of an ‘inside’
and an ‘outside’ of schools. The importance of
wider sociopolitical framings has been stressed
throughout this chapter and, of course, schools and
schoolteachers do not exist independently of these.
On the contrary, the boundaries between classrooms
and popular culture are inherently porous and there
are, of course, very significant relationships between
formal systems of education and national policy
frames. The way that contemporary British society
positions its relationship with the Holocaust – and
with the memory of the Holocaust, as described in
Chapter 1 – is therefore of considerable importance,
especially given the central role routinely awarded
to education in ensuring that the ‘lessons’ of the
Holocaust are ‘learned’.
In this respect, it is helpful to note the small but
potentially significant group of 25 students who,
in response to survey question 30, described their
understanding of the Holocaust primarily as an act
of remembrance. Some appeared to interpret the
term even more specifically as a discrete day, or
‘moment’, of commemoration or reflection:
[The Holocaust is] the remembrance of the millions
of people who died in the nazi camps for being
different (Year 10 student).
Holocaust is the day when the Jews remember all
the other Jews who got killed by Adolf Hitler
(Year 10 student).
Remembrance day of the genocide of jews
(Year 11 student).
It was Hitler’s discrimination against Jews. It is now
used as the name of the day we remember this
(Year 7 student).
It is where we have a moment where we remember
the jews (Year 9 student).
Holocaust is a day were we think back to what Hitler
did to the jews (Year 10 student).
Again, the number of students articulating
understandings such as these was proportionately
very small and, even in this small group, some
appeared to have confused ‘the Holocaust’ with
remembrance of the First or Second World Wars.
However, their responses arguably illustrate a
wider impact upon students’ thinking that stems
from collective acts of commemoration, such as
Holocaust Memorial Day, and the central role often
awarded to schools within these.
Returning to our theoretical framework of
shared schemata and social representations –
and more specifically to their plastic but resistant
nature – Jean-Claude Abric suggests a dominant
representation may change ‘if there is a radical threat
to [its] organising structure’, what he refers to as
its ‘nucleus’:
Change in the meaning and values attached to
the peripheral elements will only lead to superficial
change, but a transformation in the nucleus will
change the whole nature and structure of the
representation itself (quoted in Augoustinos
and Innes 1990: 227).
If we return to look at Figure 3.13 and allow
ourselves to imagine that the lines it charts offer a
figurative tracing around precisely such a nucleus,
it would appear that there is very little indication of
transformation or change. Nor for that matter was
there evidence of significant transformation across
year groups as depicted in Figure 3.3; all students
irrespective of age and prior educational encounter
were most likely to prioritise named victims,
perpetrators and actions in their descriptions and
to award much less attention to when or where the
Holocaust took place.
There are at least two important implications
of this. The first concerns the question of why the
core content of students’ collective conceptions is
consistently structured in such a manner in the first
place. Here we need, once again, to consider wider
discursive framings and critically reflect upon the
symbolic work we – as a national society – most
commonly ask the Holocaust to do. If, as already
suggested in Chapter 1, our encounters with this
history are typically conceived in terms of opportunity,
if not obligation, to learn overarching ‘lessons from
the past’, then it is easy – perhaps even necessary
– to allow the Holocaust to become decoupled
from a specific place and time. Offering a similar
interpretation, Alexander (2003: 28) contends that, as a
social representation, the Holocaust has become ‘freefloating
rather than situated’, ‘universal rather than
particular’, ‘a traumatic event for all of humankind’.
The second implication regards the way forward
for teaching and learning. If it were considered
important to do so, an educational intervention
could clearly emphasise particular key events
and turning points or specifically try to expand
students’ awareness of the Holocaust’s unfolding