Why We Need to Learn About the Holocaust and How Viruses Are Spread into a Pandemic: Schools' Curriculums In Today's Age

 Nadene Goldfoot                                         

In the United States, the states of Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Kentucky, Michigan, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Texas;  a total of 16 states have mandatory Holocaust education.   You don't see Tennessee teaching about the Holocaust.  They just banned a book, Maus, that does just that, teaches about the Holocaust that teen-agers would like.  

The following states require Holocaust education as part of their secondary school curricula.  Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and Wisconsin, 23 states out of 50, not even a full half.  

 As a retired teacher, I'm all for teaching about the most horrid historic event in the world.  It was in my lifetime ! My grandparents came to the USA before it happened in the early 1900s.  I'm appalled to think that after 77 years when this came to an end, there are adults in our country who have never heard about it, or who it affected or how it happened to start. Since it happened once, we don't want to see it ever happen again to ANY group of people.  The only way to keep something like this at bay is education.  Know about it.  Keep it from happening again.  It's the most important  but horrid event in World History.       

• "Maus” author Art Spiegelman spoke to CNBC after a school board in Tennessee voted to ban his landmark graphic novel about the Nazis’ persecution of Jews. The Jan. 10 vote by the McMinn County School Board only began attracting attention Wednesday.  

•  Art Spiegelman, born Itzhak Avraham ben Zeev Spiegelman on February 15, 1948).  Spiegelman was born  in Stockholm, Sweden.
•  He immigrated with his parents who were born in Poland to the US in 1951.   Art is an American cartoonist, editor, and comics advocate best known for his graphic novel Maus. His work as co-editor on the comics magazines Arcade and Raw has been influential, and from 1992 he spent a decade as contributing artist for The New Yorker.                                        
  
  Spiegelman visited the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1979 as research for Maus; his parents had been imprisoned there.
•                                                
  
        Maus was the 1st graphic novel to win a Pulitzer Prize.  
• It comes amid a number of battles in school systems around the country as conservatives target curriculums over teachings about the history of slavery and racism in America.  “I’m kind of baffled by this,” Spiegelman said.

As of December 2021, laws mandating education in the Holocaust were on the books in Austria, France, Germany, Hungary, Israel, the Netherlands, Poland, Switzerland, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada.      

It's taken 77 years to get such laws passed so that students grow up knowing about the Holocaust.  California was the first to start which they did in 1985.  

California

1985

California Education Code Section 51220

Instruction shall provide a foundation for understanding ... human rights issues, with particular attention to the study of the inhumanity of genocide, slavery, and the Holocaust, and contemporary issues.

 Texas has a week of studying about the Holocaust.  they just started in 2018.  

Texas

2018

SB 1828

Holocaust Remembrance Week shall include age-appropriate instruction, as determined by each school district. Instruction shall include: (1) information about the history of and lessons learned from the Holocaust; (2) participation, in person or using technology, in learning projects about the Holocaust; and (3) the use of materials developed or approved by the Texas Holocaust and Genocide Commission.

   Oregon just started teaching about the Holocaust last year.  There are many companies who have books for children that teach about the Holocaust.  Scholastic is one of them.  One of the most unimaginable tragedies of our time, the Holocaust can be a difficult subject to both teach and discuss.                    

The 24 carefully curated books on this list can be used in a variety of ways to help students understand both the history and the cultural significance of this grave time period in human history. This list includes gripping first-person accounts from historical figures like Anne Frank and Elie Wiesel; moving stories of heroic rescues from both adult and children survivors; and award-winning, bestselling Holocaust fiction like Lois Lowry's Number the Stars and Marcus Zusak's The Book Thief. This collection is a essential resource for any classroom library.                                                                    

Oregon

2019

SB 664

Requires school districts to provide instruction about Holocaust and genocide beginning with 2020–2021 school year.

This means that there are 31 states who are not going to teach about the Holocaust like the stand Tennessee has chosen.  Last week, Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene compared House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's decision to continue to require members of the House to wear masks on the chamber floor to steps Nazis took to control the Jewish population during the Holocaust. Her comments were swiftly condemned. 

                                               

 

 She had the audacity, the chutzpa, to use the most horrible group, Nazis, who ever existed on this planet, to compare with a member of our government who's trying to follow the scientist's advice on dealing with the worst pandemic on this planet which is wiping out thousands of people, getting close to a million. How can she possibly think that asking people to protect each other by wearing masks during the worst pandemic ever experienced is anything like the treatment that Nazis acted towards Jews?  

This is what has happened to a town without any Holocaust education, anti-Semitism.  This should never happen in the USA.  “Though a great deal has been done, it is alarmingly clear that 77 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, the shock is wearing off,” Herzog said at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem on Thursday evening. “We are seeing a surge in antisemitic assaults online; a normalization of antisemitic terminology in mainstream media; and an introduction of social media platforms refocused on Jew hatred to newer, younger audiences.”

Besides killing 6 million of us, they were excruciatingly cruel in their treatment of the people before they were killed!   

In the United States, more than 73.2 million Corona virus cases have been reported, according to Johns Hopkins University, and more than 877,000 people have died from the virus in the U.S. I note that Greene is from Georgia, a state not teaching about the Holocaust.  Do they teach science?  Sorry, Georgia, but just as children are representatives of their family, your Marjory is a representative of your state.  

 I have a cousin in Illinois who is still suffering from getting the Corona virus, and he is miserable, very angry from still going through such suffering.  How does Greene think we'll ever get over this pandemic if we don't stop the virus's capability to get into our system? We're in a new era, and we have to accept it and deal with it as best we can.   

Resource:

THE HOLOCAUST by Martin Gilbert

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/republicans-take-sides-for-a-trump-fueled-tug-of-war-over-russia/ar-AATeU2G?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_requiring_teaching_of_the_Holocaust#:~:text=In%20the%20United%20States%2C%20the,states%20have%20mandatory%20Holocaust%20education.

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/26/tennessee-school-board-bans-holocaust-comic-maus-by-art-spiegelman.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_Spiegelman

https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/29/us/holocaust-marjorie-taylor-greene-states-trnd/index.html

https://www.ajc.com/news/coronavirus-how-many-people-have-died-from-the-virus-the/mYlJ0bpc9DVgb2scSJGlEM/

https://www.scholastic.com/teachers/teaching-tools/book-lists/24-books-for-teaching-the-holocaust.html

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/rep-majorie-taylor-greene-shouts-aoc-outside-house-accuses-democrat-n1267206