Brit Teachers Ignore Holocaust to avoid offending Muslims

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Have the Brits totally lost it? Evidently they are so cowed by threats from Muslim extremists that they've decided not to teach history that might offend them....

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Schools are dropping the Holocaust from history lessons to avoid offending Muslim pupils, a Government backed study has revealed. It found some teachers are reluctant to cover the atrocity for fear of upsetting students whose beliefs include Holocaust denial.

There is also resistance to tackling the 11th century Crusades - where Christians fought Muslim armies for control of Jerusalem - because lessons often contradict what is taught in local mosques.

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That's just digusting, if wide-spread.

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It found some teachers are dropping courses covering the Holocaust at the earliest opportunity over fears Muslim pupils might express anti-Semitic and anti-Israel reactions in class.

I can think of no better way to confront and deal with racism in any form than to confront it. I also noted this passage:

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It added: "In another department, the Holocaust was taught despite anti-Semitic sentiment among some pupils.

"But the same department deliberately avoided teaching the Crusades at Key Stage 3 (11- to 14-year-olds) because their balanced treatment of the topic would have challenged what was taught in some local mosques."

A third school found itself 'strongly challenged by some Christian parents for their treatment of the Arab-Israeli conflict-and the history of the state of Israel that did not accord with the teachings of their denomination'.

I can see why teaching the history of the crusades would be embarrassing to teachers in England, but i continue to assert that the best way to deal with embarrassing lessons from history is to confront them. Part of the problem with the perception of the West by Muslims is that they believe that the Crusades never ended, and have a paranoid belief that the West is trying to exterminate them. These are issues which need to be confronted. The support for the state of Israel and the treatment of Palestinians by the Israelis also needs to be confronted, and to be confronted without fear of being labeled as antisemitic for taking a realistic view of Israel and its policies.

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Actually, there's quite a good unit e.g. about the Holocaust

(You can download all units from 15hundred-something onwards as pdf-data here - Holocaust is unit 19)

"Teaching Emotive and Controversial History" is one topic, btw, at The Historical Association's Annual General Meeting 2007 in two weeks in London.
Thta is lectured by Andrew Wrenn, Cambridgeshire's General Adviser for History, who has developed a series of Citizenship-related projects in schools.

Like this one:

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Myths and memories of the Second World War

This project involves an examination of resistance to Nazi rule in three comparative countries - France, Germany and Britain. Students consider how the memory of these events shaped the way those countries see each other now and how they choose to remember the events in their countries, e.g. British people who view Germany solely in relation to two World Wars and the 1966 World Cup.

Obviously there's a discrepance between the curriculum for history and what teacher actually teach ... or are able to teach.

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What they are actually able to teach is an important consideration. It would help to know from whence the motivation to ignore or suppress the teaching of historical events. Is this motivated by fears of the individual teachers? Are the the equivalent of school boards in English counties which can pressure the schools about what they teach? It would be interesting to know how these approaches to teaching history are motivated.

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I know from one county that a a history teacher I'm friendly with has been asked by the County District School Board to go to various other schools to improve the history teaching there (and her school is a "science specialist").

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It would indeed by interesting to find out about why those teachers decided to avoid teaching a certain subject. I mean, if these teachers had to fear for their personal safety if they decided to talk about these issues, that would obviously be a completely different situation than if they dropped it because they didn't want to offend some sensibilities amongst pupils....

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It might as well be - and that's what I suspect - that they, they teachers, aren't educated in those subjetcs so well as they could teach it controversically.
Additionally, some pedagogic skills could be missing, too.
(That's what I have learnt from hearsay.)

Prince Charles' summer school for history (and English) teachers is a great platform for such debates, btw.

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That would be a pretty sorry state of affairs.

However, I seem to remember complaints about the fact that British pupils were taught a disproportionate amount of Third Reich history (even more than pupils in Germany), with the downside that they had a total lack of knowledge when it came to other relevant historical events. Do I misremember that?

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Well, any case in which this happened is obviously a bad thing. Thats just not right.

I note that the source of the article is the Daily Mail though - a tabloid newspaper like The Sun (you know, the kind that has headlines that fill half the front page), just more rabidly rightwing still. So I'm taking this still with a grain of salt.

It would be useful to look up the cited study, funded by the Department for Education and Skills, to see what it says exactly, and what the scope of this is - an isolated case or two (also bad, but still, an isolated case or two) or something that is happening on a worrying scale.

Unfortunately, right now, I dont feel like doing research. Sorry Razz

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As said, nimh, the study isn't published yet (it will be presented e.g. at that conference on April 14, but most certainly be online earlier).

Similar reports have been published in all British media yesterday/today - it's from a press release.

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old europe wrote:

That would be a pretty sorry state of affairs.

However, I seem to remember complaints about the fact that British pupils were taught a disproportionate amount of Third Reich history (even more than pupils in Germany), with the downside that they had a total lack of knowledge when it came to other relevant historical events. Do I misremember that?

Yep - that has been so (or similar).

I posted a link to the history curriculum earlier

Walter Hinteler wrote:

Actually, there's quite a good unit e.g. about the Holocaust

(You can download all units from 15hundred-something onwards as pdf-data here - Holocaust is unit 19

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Oh, yeah... Thanks, Walter!

(I'm kind of reluctant to open PDFs and video streams at the moment... I currently only have a dialup connection...)

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It will be damned interesting to look at the report when it comes out...or at least a precis.

I would liken this, (..IF it is widespread....the article looks very ambiguous on that...eg it talks of "some schools" then mentions a third school....that is looking like small numbers, unless the study has, as might well be imagined, looked at a random sample....in which case the problem might be widespread)... to the christian right trying to suppress teaching of evolution in the USA, or demanding "equal time (in SCIENCE lessons yet!!!!) to creationism or "intelligent design" that is as part of a more general movement that to suppress true scholarship to avoid upsetting stupid fundamentalist prejudices.

Our right friends here have, of course, picked up on the Muslim part of the problem...here is another problem descrribed by the article:

A third school found itself 'strongly challenged by some Christian parents for their treatment of the Arab-Israeli conflict-and the history of the state of Israel that did not accord with the teachings of their denomination'.

The report concluded: "In particular settings, teachers of history are unwilling to challenge highly contentious or charged versions of history in which pupils are steeped at home, in their community or in a place of worship."[/b]

I wonder if that will similarly raise Foxfyre's ire re "PC"?

Likely not.

Shrugs.

I can see that, if teachers feel unable to manage difficult debate and contention in the clsssroom, that they will need good support in knowing how to deal with it, because I absolutely agree this must be taught.

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I doubt we would see the same people going "Oh my god, teachers are giving in and stop teaching a certain subject because someone's religious feelings have been hurt! We have to put a foot down on that!" if the context was slightly different.

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old europe wrote:

I doubt we would see the same people going "Oh my god, teachers are giving in and stop teaching a certain subject because someone's religious feelings have been hurt! We have to put a foot down on that!" if the context was slightly different.

Well, given that the report mentions christians as well as muslims we'll get to see, I guess.

I don't give a damn which religion it is; islam, christianity, spaghetti god; it oughtn't to be affecting teaching.

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I'm sorry i dont have much information on this subject, although i had heard about similar incidents in France in political debates on TV, roundtables if you will.

from what i had heard it was definitely not a widespread phenomenon, rather numerically small individual cases (although some politicians like Marine Le Pen or Philippe de Villier or their followers had tried to make it appear like a massive threat).

I'm relatively youg (22), so it was not that long ago that i was in high school, being taught about WWII and the Holocaust.

I live in what we call here a banlieue (a ghetto, sort of), and a large part of my class, and of the school in general, was Muslim.

And i remember we were all equally disgusted by the horrors of the Holocaust. i particularly remember that there were no distinctions of colour or religion among the girls who had cried when we watched a serie of documentaries about concentration camps.

I do however remember that some students, especially those who were sons or grandsons of immigrants from Algeria, but not only them, demonstrated some form of resentment when we reached the part about decolonization and more specifically the Algerian "dirty war" of independence.

this resentment however lead to no violent expression, physical or verbal, but rather it lead to active participation in the class (more questions asked, more attention paid, ect ...)

And i gotta admit the teacher did a pretty good job in remaining impartial, but at the same time adressing issues that french ppl in general still have a hard time to face.

I know this was not really the topic of the thread, but i thaught i could share a personal experience that is somewhat related to it.

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Thank you Miguelito, that's interesting.

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How soon will it be when they stop mentioning any religion[other than Islam} because they are offensive to Moslems.

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au1929 wrote:

How soon will it be when they stop mentioning any religion[other than Islam} because they are offensive to Moslems.

Daily Mail wrote:

A third school found itself 'strongly challenged by some Christian parents for their treatment of the Arab-Israeli conflict-and the history of the state of Israel that did not accord with the teachings of their denomination'.

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Brit Teachers Ignore Holocaust to avoid offending Muslims

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