Holocaust off UK school curriculum?

[Impenitent]

This morning I received an email - one of those that gets sent around the thousands, you know - claiming that the UK has removed The Holocaust from its school curriculum because it "offended" the Moslem population which claims it never occurred.

Is this true? I've tried Googling for information but I'm a dreadfully unsuccessful googler and I could find nothing.

If it is true, well...I don't know what to say. But I'm not sure there is any foundation to it. Has anyone heard anything about such a thing?

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Impy, I have heard about that too. I'm not sure how accurate the source is, though. I agree that it is horrifying if true.

[Frelga]

Someone - Storyteller, I believe - started a thread to that effect on TORC. No one who posted there seemed to contest the accuracy.

[Impenitent]

I am so shocked that I feel hollow.

How can we simply stop teaching history? Will Apartheid in South Africa be wiped off the historical map because it's an embarrassing episode? Slavery in the US? The Pol Pot regime?

Good Gods!

[Jnyusa]

I found this on the web:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/a ... ge_id=1770

It does not seem to be an official policy but rather individual teachers who have been deciding to "skip" this lesson to avoid creating troubles in Moslem-dominated classrooms. They are "skipping" the lessons on the Crusades for the same reason.

The article seems to suggest that there will be an official crackdown to avoid individual teachers cleaning up history to suit themselves.

Jn

[Impenitent]

Thank you Jn! I haven't been able to turn up anything - I obviously used the wrong search criteria.

[Alys]

The thread on TORC did contain contradictions of the story later on, with contributions from MrsSmeagol and Melth (both teachers), the whole thing was blown entirely out of proportion by the press and certain other groups. I'd need to read the thread again, but if I remember correctly this had happened at one school, possibly two.

TORC thread

I can't personally speak for English schools, although others did on TORC, but I have worked in the Scottish education system for over ten years now and I can assure you that the holocaust is not officially avoided in any way here. I say officially because I suppose it's possible that some school somewhere is avoiding the issue.

I suspect the email you received is meant to fire up anti-moslem feeling Imp, some of the stuff about this on the net has been simply ridiculous.

[superwizard]

Wow
This is the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. I'm mostly saddened by the fact that there still are some people who deny the holocaust. Whatever one's opinion on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are that does not change history. I also want to point out that all the Muslims I've asked believe that the holocaust did in fact happen.

[ToshoftheWuffingas]

Imp, this is simply a lie being spread around in order to stir up a reaction. It is not the only one of course. Question instead why someone would promulgate the lie. Notice how people here accepted it as fact without questioning the truth and then see how easily falsehood spreads on the Web.
As a matter of fact 45 years ago I wasn't taught about the Holocaust in school. My history courses covered different time periods but I am sure it wasn't a political decision. The facts of the genocide were well known and easily found out in more detail. That is still the case now.

[axordil]

We never skipped it, but then, we never got to it. Always ran out of time during the Depression at the end of the school year in high school. I don't think it was maliciousness so much as poor class plans...

[Jnyusa]

Like Ax, I got very little coverage of WWII in High School. There was a modern history course that started with the American Revolution and worked it's way forward to WWII, and a civics course that started with 'today' (late 1960s) and worked its way backward to WWII, but they failed to meet in the middle because we ran out of time.

I think there's a real dilemma concerning the age at which to cover modern genocides - not just the Holocaust but the American Indians, Armenia, Cambodia, etc. My daughters got some of this in Middle School and that was too early, in my opinion.

Jn

[Primula Baggins]

I know my high school never got as far as WWII. And Vietnam, forget it. One of my junior-high social studies teachers was a Vietnam vet, and the war was still on. And he got in trouble from parents a couple of times for mentioning the war in class.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

My school had a whole class about the Holocaust. But I went to high school in a very Jewish community (Great Neck, NY).

However, we didn't learn anything at all about the oppression of Native Amerians or African slavery/colonialism. Or Asian colonialism either, for that matter.

[elfshadow]

Tosh, I'm so glad to hear that this is hopefully just a rumor--I was shocked when I first read Imp's post! The idea of simply leaving out such a monumental part of our history is horrifying. Then again, I'm sure that other parts of our history are also glossed over much more than they should be.

Maybe it's because I'm part of the younger generation, but my history classes spent a lot of time talking about the Holocaust. In fifth grade I remember taking a field trip to a local museum that had a special exhibit on the Holocaust. I also remember clearly having a lot of class time devoted before the trip to learning about it, because the things that I saw at the exhibit were mostly not new information to me. And I was only nine! In my sophomore year of high school we watched a film comprised of footage shot by US and Soviet soldiers coming into the camps after the European part of the war had ended--that was without a doubt one of the two most horrifying films I have seen, the other being a PBS documentary about the Rwandan genocide.

Certainly, though, many other historical atrocities were glossed over or not even mentioned in my history class. 1.5 million Cambodians were killed under Pol Pot's rule and I never learned that in history class. I hardly spent any time at all learning about apartheid. I learned some about the Japanese internment camps in the US in WWII, but most of that I learned on my own through personal reading. And, something that still floors me, I had no idea what WWI was about until I took world history my sophomore year in high school. We studied a lot about WWII, but hardly anything about the first one. For a long time, I thought it was just a minor war. I wish I had known more about it when I was younger.

[Primula Baggins]

Elsha, it sounds as if things are changing for the better—I know my own kids study the holocaust extensively in high school, as well as just about every other historical tragedy including Armenia, Cambodia, and Rwanda.

I wonder, cynically, whether this has been allowed to happen in American schools because the mantle of "controversy" has passed to evolution and global warming. When I was in school it was sex education and history: U.S. history that was not hagiography about the Founding Fathers and that mentioned economic reasons for anything was communist propaganda.

[elfshadow]

I do hope that history class is changing for the better, Prim. There are still areas that are, in my mind, inadequately covered (Armenia was another thing I never learned about ) but for the most part I think that the curriculum rarely skips over events intentionally. It sounds as though, in the past, that's what has happened.

You raise a very good point about the shifting of controversial topics. I did learn some about evolution in science classes, but not as much as I think I should have. I hardly learned anything about global warming, most of what I have learned has come from outside sources.

[Griffon64]

Will Apartheid in South Africa be wiped off the historical map because it's an embarrassing episode?

Fear not, Apartheid will never be forgotten. Any South African can tell you that

For one thing, 100 years from now, all the ills of the current, increasingly corrupt, power-hungry, race-infatuated and removed from the needs of the people government will still be blamed on Apartheid.

Humanity is hell-bent on repeating its mistakes. The few voices of those wonderful human beings who are able to rise above the mire of the masses locked into the same stupid patterns are usually silenced too soon ( eg. Martin Luther King Jr. ) or gently shunted aside by those in power ( eg. Nelson Mandela, Archbishop Desmond Tutu ) because it does not suit the devices of the powerful to have their voices heard. History is written by the victor, after all.

[Frelga]

Imp, this is simply a lie being spread around in order to stir up a reaction. It is not the only one of course. Question instead why someone would promulgate the lie. Notice how people here accepted it as fact without questioning the truth and then see how easily falsehood spreads on the Web.

Tosh, if you re-read the first post, you will see that Impish indeed questioned the original email.

From what I found on the subject it seems that the story boils down to some (few? several?) teachers omitting Holocaust and/or Crusades from their classes because they felt uncomfortable or intimidated. It's not the same as the British educational system making such a policy, as some of the spin seems to imply. But even in that scope, if true, it is not, to me, a negligible issue.

Here's an excerpt from Daily Mail article that Jn linked to. Tosh, are you saying that the article is inaccurate?

The study, funded by the Department for Education and Skills, looked into 'emotive and controversial' history teaching in primary and secondary schools.

It found some teachers are dropping courses covering the Holocaust at the earliest opportunity over fears Muslim pupils might express anti-Semitic and anti-Israel reactions in class.

The researchers gave the example of a secondary school in an unnamed northern city, which dropped the Holocaust as a subject for GCSE coursework.

The report said teachers feared confronting 'anti-Semitic sentiment and Holocaust denial among some Muslim pupils'.

It added: "In another department, the Holocaust was taught despite anti-Semitic sentiment among some pupils.

<...>

A third school found itself 'strongly challenged by some Christian parents for their treatment of the Arab-Israeli conflict-and the history of the state of Israel that did not accord with the teachings of their denomination'.

[ToshoftheWuffingas]

Without seeing the original report Frelga I couldn't say. I wouldn't trust for one moment any interpretation of the report by the Daily Mail. The Daily Mail has a long reputation for anti-immigrant stories. In the 1930's it was the Jews; now it is Muslims. 20 years ago it was the Caribbean community.

I read that as one school only dropped a course that covered the Holocaust.
Another school had some pupils who expressed anti-Semitic views.
Another school had some vocal probably fringe Christian parents. Parents have little or no influence on UK school syllabuses by the way. And that is using the Mail's own words. I bet the report looked very different.

[Pearly Di]

Tosh, are you saying that the article is inaccurate?

I've not read the article concerned nor indeed have I heard of this story ...

obviously because I don't read The Daily Mail.

I will say though, Frelga, that like Tosh I regard The Daily Mail as a right-wing tabloid whose journalism I wouldn't trust as far as I could throw it.

Of course all newspapers have their biases but anything I read in The Mail I take with a HUGE pinch of salt. It's the kind of tabloid that likes to make a fuss about Britain's asylum seekers, for example, in a way I find downright RACIST.

I'm not saying there might not be some truth in this story, btw ... and if this is true, it certainly gives cause for alarm. The Holocaust has been on British school curriculums for many years. But I share Tosh's suspicions about the way The Mail is reporting this issue.