Facing History and Ourselves: Holocaust and Human Behavior
Vaclav Havel has called the building of a civil society the "greatest challenge of our time. " We can meet that challenge by reviving the time-honored idea that history is a branch of moral philosophy with lessons that can serve as guidelines for prudent thinking and moral behavior. As teachers and students explore the roots of religious, racial, and ethnic hatreds and their consequences, they come to recognize that some of the characters that appear in the darkest corners of history may ultimately be ourselves. If we can look under a microscope at history and ask students to analyze events that threatened democracy in one of the most murderous centuries - the twentieth century - perhaps we can help students understand the fragility of democracy and the critical role citizens play in building and preserving democractic institutions.

The history of the Holocaust, the Nazis' attempt to annihilate the Jews of Europe, like every history, is both universal and particular. As Eva Fleischner has noted, "We can attain universality only through particularity: there are no shortcuts. The more we come to know about the Holocaust, how it came about, how it was carried out, the greater the possibility we will become sensitized to inhumanity and suffering whenever they occur." Fleischner therefore, views the history of the events that led to the Holocaust not as their history but as our history. It touches us all.

Teaching the Holocaust at the university level is important, although it is late for a student to come for the first time to this event. However, reaching out to schools of education, where young teachers can study this history in order to transmit it to their students is an ideal place to exmaine both the content and the pedagogy. However, if we have a chance to teach this history to any student at any time in a student's life it is an opportunity. The events that led to the Holocaust raise profound and disturbing questions about the consequences of our actions and our beliefs, of how we as individuals make distinctions between right and wrong, good and evil. These questions are universal even though the Holocaust is unique. To study and teach the history of the events that led to the Holocaust is to investigate the most fundamental questions about issues of human behavior, to wrestle with the fullest range of moral and ethical choices and judgments, and to examine a history that engaged every component of society.

The scope and sequence of such a study are key to helping students, especially those who are learning the history for the first time, understand how and why an event that took place over a half a century ago has bearing on their lives. As students initially explore the relationship between the individual and society and consider how identity is formed, and how one acquires membership in a group, they determine who is part of their universe of obligation. Who is part of the circle of individuals and groups toward whom they feel responsible, to whom rules apply, and whose injuries call for amends? As students consider the choices people made as individuals and as members of groups and citizens of nations in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, including a consideration of the role of perpetrators and victims as well as bystanders and rescuers, students come to comprehend that many of these decisions allowed the Nazis to come to power and ultimately destroy both democracy and people. After studying the escalation of events that led to mass murder, students come to the realization that history is not inevitable and individuals and groups can impact the outcome of events by the choices they make. Following with a discussion of judgment, responsibility, legacy and participation students move from the passive learner dealing with the enormity of the horror and destruction to a feeling of empowerment as they reflect on how they might make a difference. Ultimately, a course on the Holocaust needs to end with avenues for participation and prevention.

This is an approach that encourages a confrontation with the moral questions inherent in a study not only of violence, racism, and antisemitism, but also of courage, caring and compassion. Such a course promotes an understanding of different perspectives, competing truths, and the need to comprehend one's own motives and those of others. Late adolescence and young adulthood is a time of major developmental transitions when young people are acquiring abstract reasoning and beginning to make independent moral judgments. Students need to reflect on their thinking in order to become aware of their own power to make a difference. Facing the issues that the history of the Holocaust raises is profoundly uncomfortable. Yet, if we deny students access to them, we fail to honor their potential to confront history, to make connections between history and their lives, and to make a difference today and in the future.

The psychologist Haim Ginott includes a letter at the beginning of his book Teacher and Child.

Dear Teacher:
I am a survivor of a concentration camp. My eyes saw what no man should witness: Gas chambers built by learned engineers.
Children poisoned by educated physicians. Infants killed by trained nurses. Women and babies shot and burned by high school and college graduates. So I am suspicious of education.
My request is: Help your students become human. Your efforts must never produce learned monsters, skilled psychopaths, educated Eichmanns.
Reading, writing, arithmetic are important only if they serve to make our children more humane.

This letter can serve as a reminder of both the failures and opportunities in the field of education in general and in Holocaust education in particular.