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| You are here: 2000 / Workshops, Panels and Seminars / Workshops on Education / Workshop 2 on Education, "Teaching in the Contemporary Context" / Presentation by Dr. Carol Rittner | |||||||||
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Report from Workshop 2 on Education: "Teaching in the contemporary context" Presentation by Dr. Ilya Altman Presentation by Professor Dan Bar-On presentation by Mr. Stephen Feinberg Presentation by Mrs. Myra Osrin Presentation by Dr. Carol Rittner Presentation by Dr. Carol Rittner Rittner, Carol Presentation by Dr. Carol Rittner Hundreds of books have been written about the Holocaust, but they have not diminished what Primo Levi called "the gray zone," that region of haunting questions about human behavior that cannot be answered with certainty. True, we know a great deal about what happened, who was responsible, and who was victimized, but what we don’t know is why so many Germans and their collaborators throughout Nazi occupied Europe so willingly became one of Hitler’s "willing executioners," to borrow a phrase from Daniel Goldhagen. How could ordinary human beings – people presumably raised to distinguish right from wrong, people with families of their own – participate in the vicious slaughter of powerless men, women and children? Why didn’t the structures of civil society – education, law, religion, diplomacy – stop this evil? Where did moral and religious education flounder? Why did moral and religious education fail to create more resistance to evil and encourage more doing of good? Why did the teaching of good and evil in organized societal and religious institutions fail to prevent the Holocaust? In my view, these are some of the questions that confuse, concern and confound the students I teach. What kind of education can help students grapple with such questions? More than ever we need a critical education that will address why we make wars, destroy lives, brutalize and devalue others, and follow those who lead us into the blind rage of ethnocentrism or other forms of social hatred. We need an education that will do more than provide students with the capacity to work in a postindustrial economy, important as that may be. What might such an education look like? More than forty years after Hannah Arendt described what she called the "banality of evil," we continue to be reminded of the power unquestioning conformity to authority has to make human beings willing to commit atrocities against others, so we need an "education for freedom," one in which there is constant emphasis on the development of questions and on what one might call a "critical imagination" – that is, developing in students the ability to question assumptions, challenge what is "taken for granted" and approach knowledge and truth as the stuff of human invention. We need an education that teaches the common humanness of the other, that stresses the values of caring, and that emphasizes compassion and responsibility, which prepares the individual for the doing of acts of good. Finally, we need to remind ourselves and our students that evil and goodness are enacted by "ordinary men" (and women), not by villains wearing ugly masks like in medieval allegories. To characterize the people who engage(d) in evil as "villains" – people like Hitler, Eichmann, Stangl, or Kramer, or to suggest that those who incarnate(d) goodness – like the "rescuers" during the Holocaust – were "saints" is to overestimate them. They were ordinary people. They had families and friends. They got on with the job. They were complex and complicated. They were, in a very real way, "just like us," which is what particularly makes it so confounding for students today. Just as it is important in our contemporary context to help students ask why "ordinary people" became such "willing executioners" for Hitler and the Nazis, so also is it important to help them ask why "ordinary people" aided their fellow human beings at risk of their own lives. Why did they respond when so many others passed by those who had been abandoned to death? If we could find the answer to those questions, the world would be very different from what it is today. Dr. Carol Rittner, R.S.M.Distinguished Professor, Holocaust Studies, The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey, PO Box 195, Pomona, NJ 08240-0195, USA >> Back to top |
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| For information about this production and the Stockholm International Forum Conference Series please go to www.humanrights.gov.se or contact Information Rosenbad, SE-103 33 Stockholm, Sweden | |||||||||