Nadene Goldfoot
In "SOUTHLAKE, Texas, A top administrator with the Carroll Independent School District in Southlake advised teachers last week that if they have a book about the Holocaust in their classroom, they should also offer students access to a book from an “opposing” perspective, according to an audio recording obtained by NBC News." What? They are to oppose historical facts?
I would hope that this concerned high school seniors who could have had a unit on the "Holocaust." Such a book may have been supplementary material to go along with the textbook.
How could the top administrator suggest they read an opposing piece of material to the Holocaust? Is anyone suggesting that the idea of mass killings of millions of people today is permissible? Saying such a statement would mean that they should read something like Mein Kampf? Or are they to present Holocaust deniers' arguments?
Mein Kampf is a 1925 autobiographical manifesto by Nazi Party leader Adolf Hitler. The work describes the process by which Hitler became antisemitic and outlines his political ideology and future plans for Germany. Volume 1 of Mein Kampf was published in 1925 and Volume 2 in 1926. Such a book became very popular with the Arab population and look how so many have turned out. Completely anti-semitic!
Is this what this administrator thinks is a safe book for American high school students? I should hope not. Nazis would be the first to deny the Holocaust. Let me tell you something: I remember being a young girl and seeing my Jewish father reading Mein Kampf. He never before read a book in his life, being too busy working and developing his business as a wholesale meat dealer. He was very quiet about the book with me, but acted very shocked. He was an adult with a wife and children and he was shocked. What do you think high school students will react like? There's the possibility that THEY might be suggestible like the Arabs were and turn against the Jews. That's my fear.
I've actually read every word of a book about the Holocaust, and read it as a middle aged adult: THE Holocaust-A HISTORY OF THE JEWS OF EUROPE DURING THE SECOND WORLD WAR, by Martin Gilbert. It's index goes from page 897-959; 62 pages worth. Elie Wiesel's comment was that this book must be read, but I think age would be a deciding point, as it's hard to swallow.
Teachers at this same school district go through training about books. The training came four days after the Carroll school board, responding to a parent’s complaint, voted to reprimand a fourth grade teacher who had kept an anti-racism book in her classroom. During the recent training, this was recorded and shared with NBC. (Are there children's books of Anti-Racism on the market? Who was reading it? )
“Just try to remember the concepts of [House Bill] 3979,” Peddy said in the recording, referring to a new Texas law that requires teachers to present multiple perspectives when discussing “widely debated and currently controversial” issues. “And make sure that if you have a book on the Holocaust,” Peddy continued, “that you have one that has an opposing, that has other perspectives.”
“How do you oppose the Holocaust?” one teacher said in response.
“Believe me,” Peddy said. “That’s come up.” (Notice, he doesn't have an answer as there is none, but he expects the teachers to understand and abide by such nonsense.) If they were discussing Covid 19, I know there are lots of pros and cons, and I saw a great debate on that with Robert Kennedy, son of the Senator who's also a lawyer, with Alan Dershowitz. You can't debate, at least logically and fairly, about the Holocaust.
I've been a judge in a high school of their debate class. Of course, if you don't want people to be brain-washed, they must know both sides of a problem. Hearing only one side, you can develop a Civil War in your own country with people knowing only one fact. But you just can't say, pick any book that is against the Holocaust, as there are a lot of Nazi-type books and anti-Semitic book out on the web and in the stores and libraries and on you-tube as well, probably. Really, prepping students intelligently and mercifully should be a part of the Holocaust studies, but beware of any anti-Semitic material someone could introduce to minds just beginning to understand.
Carroll spokeswoman Karen Fitzgerald said the district is trying to help teachers comply with the new state law and an updated version that will go into effect in December, Texas Senate Bill 3. “Our district recognizes that all Texas teachers are in a precarious position with the latest legal requirements,” Fitzgerald wrote, noting that the district’s interpretation of the new Texas law requires teachers to provide balanced perspectives not just during classroom instruction, but in the books that are available to students in class during free time. “Our purpose is to support our teachers in ensuring they have all of the professional development, resources and materials needed. Our district has not and will not mandate books be removed nor will we mandate that classroom libraries be unavailable.”Fitzgerald said that teachers who are unsure about a specific book “should visit with their campus principal, campus team and curriculum coordinators about appropriate next steps.”
Clay Robison, a spokesman for the Texas State Teachers Association, a union representing educators, said there’s nothing in the new Texas law explicitly dealing with classroom libraries. Robison said the book guidelines at Carroll, a suburban school district near Fort Worth, are an “overreaction” and a “misinterpretation” of the law. Three other Texas education policy experts agreed. “We find it reprehensible for an educator to require a Holocaust denier to get equal treatment with the facts of history,” Robison said. “That’s absurd. It’s worse than absurd. And this law does not require it.”
They could read this book.
When Romek Wajsman was liberated from the brutal concentration camp of Buchenwald in 1945, both his physical and emotional selves had been subjected to unfathomable torments. Only fourteen years old, Romek, who would later assume the name Robbie Waisman as an emigrant to Canada, had lived before the war in a small Polish shtetl. (I"m already questioning the truth in this novel. I can't understand how a young child was in the concentration camp who could have been 10 when he first arrived. "As many as 1.5 million Jewish children alone were murdered or died at the hands of Nazi officials or their collaborators."
It's not good to tell lies in order to reach the child's level of understanding, but not get into detail at certain ages. It's like the old joke of a child asking where he came from and the mother going into great detail about the birds and the bees and people. The child listened, then commented. Oh, Johnnie said he was from Florida. I'm thinking of the 6th graders (11 to 12 years old) studying the Holocaust. None of us want them to be horrified, or fed with anti-Semitism, either.
In Texas, however, each public school student shall receive mandatory instruction in the Holocaust, genocide and human rights violations from grade six through grade twelve. Students should be reading appropriate -aged books about the Holocaust, and certainly nothing to argue for killing Jews. There's no position for such stupidity. Nothing on earth can be given for killing 6 million people for any reason. The Nazis killed people who were not perfect, besides the Jews. No country does that, either. We all pride ourselves for developing humane cultures, quite the opposite of what the Nazis developed.
I certainly hope that the teachers involved in this teaching are not Holocaust deniers, themselves. Those are the very ones who should be learning the opposing view that the Holocaust happened and that 6 million Jews were horribly killed ,and that no one has the right to slaughter an entire people. Major misconceptions about the Holocaust are common among teachers, research suggests.
Most teachers in England lack the knowledge to combat common myths and falsehoods about the atrocity, research by University College London's Centre for Holocaust Education suggests. They said there had been improvements since a similar study in 2009. But the researchers warned of "real-world consequences" from a lack of understanding. The research found:
- Most teachers did not know where or when the Holocaust began: Most could not correctly identify the proportion of the German population that was Jewish in 1933:
- Whatever unit material is provided for them did not provide enough information, taking in consideration that they should provide the teacher with some knowledge as well, as teachers may not take the time to educate themselves about the Holocaust, the most horrible event on earth that ended 76 years ago.
Jewish students should be aware of the time when Haman of Persia tried to do this very thing and was stopped by Queen Esther and her King, Ahasueros. He had set out to kill all the Jews in the Persian kingdom. That's what Purim is all about. The massacre started, but was stopped, It happened from 1939-1945 in the Holocaust. It could happen again.
Resource:
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/southlake-texas-holocaust-books-schools-rcna2965
https://www.jewishbookcouncil.org/book/boy-from-buchenwald
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/children-during-the-holocaust
https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-58523132
https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/16690175
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1npq5k
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