Teaching the Holocaust in UK schools

You may have heard that the UK has stopped teaching the Holocaust in its schools to avoid alienating Muslim students. There's an e-mail to that effect that's been going around, and it's been getting a bit of space in the blogosphere.

Headlines in the British press on the story included "No lessons on the Holocaust" (Telegraph) and "Schools drop Holocaust lessons to avoid offence" (Times). The version of the e-mail that I got claimed that "UK removed The Holocaust from its school curriculum because it 'offended' the Moslem population which claims it never occurred."

This all seemed to be a bit unlikely, so I decided to look into the report that started the whole story: Teaching Emotive and Controversial History (pdf) by the Historical Association. The newspaper reports suggest that the problem of not teaching the Holocaust in schools was widespread throughout the country. The report itself says nothing of the sort.

"For example, a history department in a northern city recently avoided selecting the Holocaust as a topic for GCSE coursework for fear of confronting anti-Semitic sentiment and Holocaust denial among some Muslim pupils."

That's it. The investigators found a single school that chose not to teach the Holocaust to its students. Its possible, of course, that lots of schools that weren't studied made a similar decision. But in the absence of evidence showing that they did, it's tremendously irresponsible of the press to report a widespread problem that simply doesn't exist.

For more details on the situation and the real state of Holocaust education in the UK, you can check out Snopes and the Holocaust Education Trust.

There are a couple of things to be said about cases like this. Most obvious are boilerplate mutterings about how the media do an awful job reporting stories accurately and should be more responsible. This is a pretty standard complaint, with good reason: the press often dramatically overstates the conclusions of reports like these.

Potentially just as harmful, this story shows how powerful narratives can be and how people will eagerly grab onto any anecdote that confirms their view of the world. We're all guilty of this misstep. We see a story that confirms our biases and accept it without hesitation. We come across a story that challenges our viewpoint and we examine it more closely, looking for holes in the story that weakens its reliability. Within history, cultural historians are particularly vulnerable to this phenomenon as much of their work is qualitative and impressionistic; it is all to easy to brush aside those texts that don't fit cleanly into whatever narrative we've come up with.

In the case of UK schools teaching the Holocaust, the narrative that bought the story to prominence is pretty clear. It goes something like this: the rising tide of Islamofascism, backed up by terrorist acts like the September 11th attacks, is threatening the cultural fabric of the West. If it's not stopped, we'll end up under the yoke of mullahs, subject to Sharia, our women forced to wear burkhas.

Some rightwingers' response to Nancy Pelosi's recent trip to Syria provide another example of how this sort of thing happens. Faced with a picture of Pelosi wearing a headscarf in a mosque, the denizens of Little Green Footballs proclaimed things like "a lot more American women are going to be wearing headscarves if these knuckleheaded dhimmis re-take the White House in '08." Never mind that Laura Bush and Condoleezza Rice have worn similar scarves when visiting mosques. If a Democrat appears in Muslim garb, there's only one possible conclusion: the downfall of western civilization.

Pre-existing narratives can have a powerful hold on how we filter and respond to the news. The solution lies not in abandoning narratives (an impossible task), but in adopting a greater degree of skepticism, both towards outrageous claims (the UK is no longer teaching the Holocaust!) and towards stories that fall too neatly into our preconceived notions of the world. Critically evaluating our own narratives brings us closer to the truth and helps develop a sense of intellectual humility, noble outcomes both.