History Hysteria: Religious Right Attacks Holocaust Education In Kentucky
According to the Religious Right, being tolerant is just about the worst thing you can do.
Teachers are always looking for ways to make history a more interesting and relevant subject. Young people tend to get turned off if history appears to be little more than memorizing a dry list of dates, names and battles.
Many schools want to find ways to make history come alive. In my daughter’s high school, the class did special projects when they discussed the 1920s. (My daughter designed and sewed her own flapper dress.) When it was time to study the Great Depression, the class watched and then discussed the 1940 film adaptation of “The Grapes of Wrath.”
Hoping to get students more engaged in history, educators in Jefferson County, Ky., have adopted a new approach called “Exploring Civics: Facing History and Ourselves.” The class is a response to a 2008 state law mandating that schools develop materials that can be used to teach about the Holocaust.
“Facing History” isn’t just lectures. It requires the students to grapple with a core question: How did a democratic society slowly lose its freedoms and become a murderous police state?
The class does not feature a textbook. Students read from a variety of sources, and the material taught is made relevant to the students. As the Louisville Courier-Journal reported, “The class begins with a study of individuality and social responsibility, in which students complete activities to assist them in defining their own role in society. They discuss the historical development of the Holocaust and other instances of collective violence and learn how to be an active, informed participant in society.”
Students end the class by taking part in a service project of their own design.
Students interviewed by the paper were enthusiastic about the course. Superintendent Sheldon Berman called it “the single best piece of curriculum that I know of because of its impact on students and its level of sophistication.”
Naturally the Religious Right is going crazy. This class teaches – egad! – tolerance. And we all know, according to the Religious Right, that being tolerant is just about the worst thing you can do. You start being tolerant, and there’s no telling where that will lead.
On its blog, the Family Foundation of Kentucky sneers that the schools are replacing civics education with tolerance and moans that “questions remain about who gets to define what ‘tolerance’ is for the students.”
The Family Foundation of Kentucky is the statewide arm of James Dobson’s Focus on the Family. I’m not surprised the group is down on tolerance. Dobson attacked that concept in 1996, telling his radio audience that tolerance is a “kind of a desensitization to evil of all varieties. Everything has become acceptable to those who are tolerant.”
The Family Foundation’s salvo is a standard Religious Right ploy. Its leaders complain incessantly about public education being a failure. Yet when a school tries something new, they carp about that as well. Other than become academies for fundamentalist Christianity, nothing the public schools do will please the Religious Right.
Back in 1993, I wrote a story for Church & State about a community in North Carolina that adopted an innovative curriculum with a heavy emphasis on the humanities. Some local Religious Right types were so dense they confused the humanities with “humanism” and went on the warpath. Education officials dealt with them respectfully but made it clear they would not change the curriculum.
I’m hoping for the same outcome in Kentucky. Public school officials have an obligation to listen to all critics, but that doesn’t mean they have to give in to them – especially when their complaints are just plain foolish.