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Previous issues of Teaching History have seen extensive debate about the appropriateness of approaching Holocaust education with explicitly social or moral - as opposed to historical - aims. Rather than taking sides, Alice Pettigrew first acknowledges the range of aims that history teachers bring to their teaching of the subject, including those deeply rooted in a commitment to citizenship education. Her argument then, is that even if such aims are accepted as valid, they simply cannot be achieved by divorcing the 'lessons' of the Holocaust from an understanding of its specific historical context. To treat the Holocaust as a universal cautionary tale is to deprive students of genuine understanding and, all too often, allows important misconceptions to go unchecked. Properly contextualised historical study, Pettigrew argues, will equip them far better to relate the Holocaust in meaningful ways to discussions about other genocides and ongoing crimes against humanity.
Regular readers of Teaching History will recognise that previous contributions concerning the Holocaust have often been framed by an apparent tension between exclusively 'historical' and otherwise 'social', 'moral' and/or 'civic' teaching aims. ' In this paper - which draws on responses given by almost 600 secondary history teachers as part of the Institute of Education's (IOE's) Holocaust Education Development Programme 2009 research, described in further detail in the Nutshell on page 56-1 return to this familiar territory but attempt to offer an alternative perspective/ As a social scientist and educational researcher rather than historian or history teacher, I do not intend to offer a final answer to the question of appropriate or inappropriate teaching aims for the history classroom. Instead, I want to highlight the commitment to teaching about the Holocaust expressed by a clear majority of teachers who took part in the IOE's study and emphasise the importance that many placed upon the subject as an opportunity to explore citizenship-related, and in particular, 'anti- racist' concerns. However, I also want to use the same data to consider critically some of the limitations of this approach. I argue that over-simplified understandings of 'racism' and 'anti-racism', and a failure to attend adequately to the contingent historical context of the Nazi genocide, risks resulting in not only 'bad history' but also ineffective education for citizenship.
Commitment to teaching...