Amy Shapiro, Ph.D., professor of philosophy and humanities at Alverno College, prefers to affect students by posing questions rather than by making pronouncements.
Even the title of her workshop at the Ateret Cohn Holocaust Educators Symposium on Sunday, March 2, formed a question: “What is the Future of Holocaust Education?”
In the course of discussion with a group of eight educators and an undergraduate education student, Shapiro expressed her belief that asking questions motivates students to think independently, come to their own conclusions and become better able to grapple with the world.
Otherwise, she said, if teachers tell students what to think, they are just manipulating students in the same way that advertisers, politicians and others manipulate them.
Shapiro said it is better to teach strategies that students can use to engage with the world than emphasize content. “Give them the facts” and let them think about the issues at whatever level they can, she said.
After raising the question, “What is the difference between knowledge and information?” she noted that “reflecting on questions will get them much further.”
The endeavor of teaching the Holocaust, “is lonely and makes us obsessive,” Shapiro said. “We are personally driven to do this and it is transformative to students.” It is also a back door to teaching about Judaism, she added.
In a discussion of the challenges teachers and students face in studying the Holocaust, participants said that its specificity — or lack of universality — is problematic. Students, especially non-white students, have difficulty connecting with the persecution of the Jews, who are white, one participant said.
But several teachers, especially one who teaches repeating ninth-graders, said it is very liberating to students of color to learn about persecutions against others. “It frees them from the individual circumstance of being the only ones being discriminated against,” she said.
Teachers noted that students at all levels, including college students, struggle with historical context, the differences between then and now. They cannot comprehend a world without the communication technology that exists now and how something like the Holocaust could happen without everyone in the world knowing about it, said a teacher from Horicon.
Another challenge of teaching the Shoah is “Holocaust fatigue,” defined by one scholar in Time magazine (Feb. 28, 2000) as “a sense of having the Holocaust perpetually rammed down [students] throats by teachers and administrators at every turn,” and by another as “hearing a variation of the same story, instead of a lesson that touches [students’] hearts and engages their minds in critical thought.”
Though some critics feel there is too much emphasis on the Holocaust, many people don’t know anything about it. There are some Americans who know little about Jews other than the Holocaust. For them, Jews can be viewed as “a problem.”
There are ways of helping today’s students connect with the Holocaust’s lessons. Shapiro agreed with some teachers who said that race should be part of the discussion.
Technology is also pertinent, she noted, as the Nazis enlisted fully the science and technology they possessed to annihilate most of the Jews of Europe.
She recommended “help[ing] students reflect on the responsibilities [that go with using] technology, by pointing out how the Holocaust could not have happened without [the gas chambers, the trains etc.]”
“This is a specific incident in history that carries enormous lessons,” Shapiro said.
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