Teaching about the Holocaust and Genocides

It is common for educators to be overwhelmed at the prospect of teaching young people about the Holocaust and genocides. The THGC is committed to offering workshops and other programs that build educators’ pedagogical and content mastery. The Commission also stresses adherence to methodological guidelines and curriculum standards, which help to establish a necessary framework for approaching the subjects in the classroom.

Teaching and learning typically depend on communicating with words and images. This dependence is unavoidably fraught with problems when educators encourage students to appreciate the scope and depth of the Holocaust’s horrors. Western civilization’s relationships to language and imagery came under assault during the Holocaust. By design, the Nazis manipulated and abused language and imagery to implement the destruction of a people. In this context, learning about the Holocaust demands sensitivity to the power of conventional tools of communication. The call for sensitivity is not a matter of monitoring word choices for mere political correctness. Rather, it is about developing a more precise lexicon that might permit us to comprehend, convey, and resist what the Nazis set out to accomplish in their assault on life and culture.