Teaching the Holocaust and the Aims of Secondary Education

Abstract

Teaching the Holocaust in American schools has been so controversial for a number of cultural reasons. First, secondary schools are one of the few public spaces where the multiple ethnicities, religions, and races are forced to achieve some kind of compromise. At the elementary level, there is general consensus that schools should focus on reading, writing, and arithmetic. However, at the secondary level, with a curriculum that includes the transmission of cultural content, things get much more complex. A textbook and curriculum cannot possibly cover everything, and so certain difficult choices must be made that inevitably involve multiple perspectives coming together. While some have suggested that it is morally wrong to compromise a topic such as the Holocaust, it simply cannot be covered in the depth it deserves without bumping out other topics.