help desk part 5

Edline is chock full of info today.

Also under the heading of Character Education, I learn that our district has adopted the Character Education Program "Facing History and Ourselves."

The Fordham Foundation report is here; some of you have read it. It would be hard to single out my favorite passage, but this comes close:

Possibly the most malevolent of the organizations professing to address citizenship education is Facing History and Ourselves (FHAO), which provides materials and services to over 16,000 teachers, ostensibly to help them address racism, anti-Semitism, and violence.4 Facing History and Ourselves is by far the most popular source of K-12 training and materials on the Holocaust. According to its Web site, it reaches over 1.5 million adolescents through its teacher network, and over 4,500 schools through regional offices in six major cities in the U.S. In addition, it now has an office in Europe. Facing History and Ourselves describes itself as an “interdisciplinary approach to citizenship education” and can be taught over a long or a short period of time and at any grade level, although it is usually taught in grade 8 or 9.

The central problem with this organization’s activities stems not from its efforts to provide students with scrupulously accurate information about the Holocaust but from its goal of teaching contemporary civic lessons for American students. To do so, it makes false analogies to a catastrophic historical event, thus trivializing the catastrophe and setting up a moral equivalence between Nazis and white Americans. The purpose of FHAO’s first major resource book, titled Holocaust and Human Behavior and published in 1982, was to encourage students to practice “moral decision-making” by speaking up about the dangers of a nuclear “holocaust” and to see the Moral Majority as a danger to freedom of speech.5 Once those dangers seemed to have receded from the political radar screen, study of the Holocaust was linked to a domestic issue with more staying power. The purpose of the 1994 resource book, bearing the same title as the 1982 manual but with a new conceptual framework, is to make sure that students see the task of confronting white racism in America as the chief reason for studying the Holocaust.6 It makes explicit and frequent comparisons not only between twentieth-century America and twentieth-century Germany but also between nineteenthcentury America and nineteenth-century Germany. In essence, it uses the Holocaust to portray America’s blacks as Europe’s Jews, thereby reducing genocide to an act of bigotry and equating white Americans to Nazis.

The purpose of the supplementary resource book FHAO published in 2002, titled Race and Membership in American History: The Eugenics Movement (RMAH), is even more poisonous.7 FHAO wants teachers and students to infer a causal connection between the American eugenics movement and the Holocaust; that is, to infer that Americans and American science, however indirectly, were responsible for Nazi Germany’s extermination policies and the Holocaust. RMAH makes it clear that few American scientists subscribed to the eugenics movement by World War II. Nevertheless, the chapters on “The Nazi Connection” so cleverly connect Hitler’s use of the ideas of German scientists on racial “eugenics” to an acknowledgment of the leadership of American scientists, educators, and policy makers in the eugenics movement that Americans appear almost directly responsible for the Final Solution.8 The net effect is the discrediting of American society.

Despite the many citations and excerpts intended to prop up the book’s implicit thesis, FHAO fails to note even one biologist as a reviewer or to give a biologist’s assessment of the influence of the eugenics movement on American or German science. While the history of the eugenics movement should be better known to the general public, one must ask why an organization devoted to a study of the Holocaust should expend its energy compiling information on the history and influence of the eugenics movement in America as if it, rather than the centuries of negative cultural stereotypes and religious and economic hatred of Jews in Christian Europe, were instrumental in the development and execution of Hitler’s Final Solution. But aside from a few pages in its 1982 and 1994 resource books, FHAO has studiously ignored the history of anti-Semitism since its inception, a criticism made by Lucy Dawidowicz in her 1990 essay. Facing History and Ourselves has just begun to introduce this book at workshops and to develop an on-line course based on the book. Social studies teachers are likely to accept FHAO’s implicit thesis about who was responsible for the Holocaust because its resource books are likely to be their only source of information on the topic. Science teachers are most unlikely to address the eugenics movement in their classes because evolutionary biologists view its influence on the history of American biology as miniscule.9

It is not difficult to understand why teachers find study of the Holocaust useful for addressing bigotry in this country. It provides them with the most horrendous image possible of a prejudiced person— a Nazi—an image that can be connected through the concept of intolerance to the image of a white racist in America. And what could better symbolize the deadly nature of intolerance unchecked and make a more powerful impression on young minds than images of death camps, gas chambers, and crematoria? Teachers who believe what they have been told repeatedly by their own instructors and the mainstream media—that bigotry and intolerance are the most serious problems we face in this country—are unlikely to have any doubts about the educational value of this curriculum despite the lack of any longitudinal research evidence that it reduces bigotry or produces more tolerant or informed citizens.

It is difficult for outsiders to find out what takes place in Facing History workshops. Only teachers from the schools that have arranged (and paid) for the workshop can attend, and the website that enables these teachers to exchange ideas about classroom practices and resources is password-protected. However, some evidence literally landed on my desk one day. In her application to a summer institute on civic education that I directed in the mid-1990s at Harvard, a grade 8 teacher who had taken a number of FHAO workshops explained how she had restructured her teaching of To Kill A Mockingbird to “help prepare students for the Facing History unit in social studies.” She was now asking her students to look for “parallels between Nazi Germany and the U.S., looking at U.S. slavery and subsequent racism as our holocaust.” In equating slavery to the Holocaust, FHAO seems to have obliterated the categorical and moral distinction between bigotry and genocide in teachers’ thinking. In implying that the American eugenics movement, however indirectly, was responsible for the Final Solution, FHAO now seeks to reduce the moral status of the United States to that of Nazi Germany and, hence, to delegitimate it.