What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

Encountering representations of the Holocaust
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which asked for a short description of the Holocaust:
The Holocaust was when the Nazis killed lots of
Jews and people they didn’t like. We covered it so
much that it is becoming very boring to learn about
and no [one] really pays attention to it anymore. We
know it’s a serious topic but we don’t need to learn
about it 24/7.
No matter how unrepresentative, this statement
reminds us that despite students’ broad appetite
to learn about this subject – even this dissenting
student says ‘it’s a serious topic’ – students’
attention and interest cannot be taken for granted.
The subject still needs to be taught in an engaging
and meaningful manner, especially if and when
students encounter the Holocaust at several points
in their school career.
For the purposes of our study, one further
measure of students’ attitudes towards learning
about the Holocaust was devised. As described in
Chapter 2, the survey included 11 questions inviting
students to indicate the extent to which they agreed
or disagreed with a series of statements such as,
‘The Holocaust does not really interest me’ and
‘The Holocaust is not related to my life because
it happened so long ago’. Students’ responses
to all 11 statements were combined to create a
single mean figure, as an indication of their overall
disposition towards engagement with this history
(for explanation of the method, see p. 27) which
enabled statistical comparison between different
student groups. The higher the score, the more
positive was a student’s attitude towards learning
about the Holocaust.
Across all students, the average score on the
measure was 34.6 (out of 44), which appears to
demonstrate very high levels of positive engagement
with the history. This data was examined across a
range of different criteria and groups of students,
as detailed below, but only very limited variation
was found – across all analyses levels of positivity
remained consistently high.
For example, students who had already learned
about the Holocaust in school were a little more
positive about the subject than those who had not,
with an average score of 35.0 compared to 33.3.
Girls appeared to have slightly more positive attitudes
towards learning about the Holocaust than boys, but
again the difference was small: an average score of
35.0 for girls across all year groups compared with
34.0 for boys. As a year group, Year 13 students
appeared collectively to hold the most positive
attitudes towards learning about the Holocaust, with
an average score of 36.1. The ‘lowest’ measure for
a single year group was the average score of 34.1
for Year 9 students.
Critically, in relation to the concerns expressed
about Muslim students’ disposition towards learning
about the Holocaust (see above), the average
score across all those survey respondents who
self-identified as Muslim was 33.8, while – by point
of comparison – the average score for those who
identified as having ‘no religion’ was 34.2. Even this
very small distinction was found to be statistically
insignificant when the potential influence of other
demographic variables such as socioeconomic class
(as indicated by the number of books in students’
homes) and academic ability (indicated by vocabulary
scores) was taken into account.
A more detailed explanation of the multiple
regression procedures used to conduct this
analysis is offered in Appendix 6. In summary, our
research indicates that – for the students who took
part in the survey – gender, academic ability and
socioeconomic class all appeared to have more
influence upon attitudes towards learning about
the Holocaust than whether a student identified as
Muslim or not. Again, across the board, all students,
irrespective of year group, gender or religious
identification articulated very positive attitudes
towards learning about the Holocaust.
Lest these findings be queried as ‘unrepresentative’
it is worth emphasising that the 1,016 students
who completed the survey and identified themselves
and/or their families as Muslim represent 12.8 per
cent of the total cohort of 7,952 students who took
part. The 2011 census figures puts the proportion
of school-aged children in the United Kingdom who
are Muslim at 8.1 per cent (Muslim Council of Britain
2015). Of the survey respondents who identified
as Muslim, 70.5 per cent indicated that religion
was ‘very important’ to them personally, 26.2 per
cent that it was ‘quite important’ and 3.4 per cent
that it was ‘not important’; 49.6 per cent identified
their ethnicity as Asian–Pakistani, 16.2 per cent as
Asian– Bangladeshi, 7.5 per cent as Asian–other
(including Indian). Again, these figures are broadly
consistent with the 2011 census information on the
United Kingdom’s adult Muslim population.
The findings reported here consequently
challenge the growing and problematic national and
international discourse that risks positioning Muslim
students as in opposition to learning about the
Holocaust in schools. Five focus-group interviews
with students from two different schools with a
very high intake of Muslims were conducted in
order to begin to examine this in further depth. It is
also important to emphasise that the two schools
had very different approaches to teaching about
the Holocaust and the students who participated
appeared to have markedly different levels of
knowledge about this history. However, among both
groups of students, discussion again revealed very
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