‘The premier demand upon all education is that Auschwitz not happen again. Its priority before any other requirement is such that I believe I need not and should not justify it.’ —Adorno, 2005, p. 191

The notion that education has a role to play in preventing the conditions that make genocide possible is not unique to Adorno. Many academics have made similar arguments (Foster et al., 2020), including Holocaust survivors themselves (Levi, 1988). Yet we must balance the desire to learn lessons from such a tragic event with academic concerns about the dangers and challenges of taking lessons from the past. There has been significant debate surrounding whether it is possible to infer lessons relevant to the present from historical events, or whether such a pursuit may result in simplistic moralising rather than understanding of the causes and nature of genocide.

‘Is it possible to infer lessons relevant to the present from historical events, or does such a pursuit result in simplistic moralising rather than understanding of the causes and nature of genocide.’

Considering this long-established debate, it came as somewhat of a surprise to me that there appears to have been relatively little research conducted into the lessons that students infer from their Holocaust studies. While there is large-scale research into what students know about the Holocaust (specifically that from UCL’s Centre for Holocaust Education), there is little that explicitly explores the lessons that students have internalised from the Holocaust. It was partly for this reason that I decided to focus my research report for my Education (History) MA (with UCL’s Institute of Education) on that very issue.

In 2022, I analysed the lessons that 15 A’ level History students (qualifications studied in England & Wales at ages 16–18) had inferred from their studies of the Holocaust. All participants were students at a sixth-form college where I am employed as a History teacher. All the participants had studied the Holocaust at an advanced level, having written 4,000-word analyses on the origins of the Holocaust. The participants were interviewed in small groups, with the transcriptions of those interviews being coded to identify patterns.

Encouragingly, during interview participants independently identified the types of lessons that some Holocaust education organisations (such as the International Holocaust Education Alliance) and theorists (Short, 2005) suggested/hoped that they might. While many different types of lessons were discussed by the participants, the most common concerned the following three broad issues.

Antiracist lessons

Ten participants considered antiracist lessons. These were references to the causes and/or nature of antisemitism and/or racism; the processes/rhetoric used by groups to discriminate; and the means to limit racism. Five participants referred to how the Nazi state promoted the concept that Jews were the enemy of the German people and/or how the Nazis attempted to isolate Jews from the wider German population. For most of these participants, there was a clear understanding that ‘othering’ processes were not unique to the Nazis and that, as Foster et al. (2020, p. 12) has observed, right-wing populists continue to use ‘age-old techniques of othering’.

Lessons about state systems

Most participants made some reference to either: the value of civil freedoms; the functioning and importance of democracy; and/or the nature and dangers of dictatorship. Interestingly, as many participants made references to the fragility of democracy as they did to the value of it. It appears that understanding the collapse of the democratic Weimar Republic in Germany has discouraged some participants from taking democracy for granted.

Lessons about human nature and agency

Most participants made some reference to ideas relating to human nature and/or agency. Many emphasised the importance of standing up and speaking out against discrimination and, similarly, some also repudiated the role of the bystander when others are being discriminated against. Others were clearly reflecting upon human nature in relation to their own selves. One highlighted recognising our own human flaws as a moral imperative: ‘There is a personal responsibility to acknowledge the fact that we are flawed in the same way that they [bystanders/those complicit in the Holocaust] were flawed and try our best to work through those flaws.’

The small sample size and dominance of certain participants should be noted as barriers to the generalisability of my research. That withstanding, I believe the results of my research challenge a false dichotomy of a ‘knowledge-rich historical’ approach versus a ‘lessons-from’ approach to Holocaust education. The participants had studied the Holocaust in great depth, and this allowed some of them, at least, to infer complex lessons from the tragedy without significant teacher intervention. It might be wondered, then, how many more students may be capable of inferring similarly complex and nuanced lessons with teacher intervention. Perhaps this is an area of research that requires further exploration. I am not advocating a pre-packed lessons approach; but practitioner-led action research at the end of students’ Holocaust education, may offer ways to explore the impact of deploying structured activities that encourage metahistorical reflection on the implications of their studies for the present.

Figure 1: Multilingual ‘Never again’ memorial at Treblinka extermination camp.

License: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pomnik_Ofiar_Obozu_Zag%C5%82ady_w_Treblince_2017c.jpg

This blog post is based on the article ‘What lessons, if any, do students infer from their studies of the Holocaust?’ by Dan Nuttall, published in the Curriculum Journal.