Curriculum Model
Preparing Curriculum for Teaching the Holocaust
By Lucy Smith
1. Why teach about the Holocaust? What do we want to accomplish by teaching about Genocides in human history? Did teaching about, for example, The Night of St. Bartolomy in France, ever prevented any other genocide?
2. If our purpose in teaching is to prevent such occurrences, then we need to reach the emotions of the students before teaching them historical facts.
3. How do we reach students' emotions? How do we cultivate sensitivity, compassion, empathy?
4. Our media are full of daily horror stories, there is a wellestablished notion that "interesting" news concern violence. How children can make distinction between violence in the media and historical violence taught in their classroom? How can they rate the importance of either, if not by degree of violence?
5. When we teach about the Holocaust we usually present to children more horror stories; either as individual stories of survivors, or as group stories of murders.
6. We read detective stories, police stories etc., all involving murders, as entertainment. How do we know why children listen to Holocaust stories; could be there an element of entertainment?
7. When we are teaching about the Holocaust, or even about centuries of persecution leading to the Holocaust, we are talking about evil, about death. We do not talk about the life of people, about their achievements, discoveries, way of life, etc. The popularity Anne Frank is due to her "aliveness" so poignantly visible through her diary.
8. We need to present many more stories about lives of outstanding (and ordinary) Jews. We need to come to the classroom with music, poetry, stories from the live of Jews from various periods of their history like, for example, Sholem Aleichem stories, Baal Shem stories etc. We need first catch students' imagination, their sense of humor, make them delight in those stories, make them like the people, not necessary only the ones that were killed, but also those from previous generations. Make students appreciate the Jews as people, before telling them about the persecutions.
9. The same should go for other people affected by Genocides. Teach about the culture and music of the Roma before talking about their destruction.
10. Try to influence the timetable of teaching about the Holocaust so the need to "fit" the given material in a particular time slot is not more important than the ultimate goal of creating sensitive, aware, empathic citizens, ready for political action when needed anywhere