If a reenactment of Hitler is to be instituted, whose conscience does this soothe? Not elementary school children’s.
In what twisted world is asking children to reenact historic horrors good pedagogy?
That’s what happened at a Washington, DC school, where third graders — eight- and nine-year-olds — were instructed to reenact scenes from the Holocaust and WW II, including Adolf Hitler killing himself in a bunker.
Would we accept a reenactment of the assassination of President Kennedy? Of the Sand Creek Massacre? Of 9/11? Of a slave trader and his cargo crossing the Atlantic?
Clearly, the “educator” behind this lesson is not fit, not least because when a student asked why Nazi Germans murdered millions of Jews she answered, “because the Jews ruined Christmas.” Such a bigoted response speaks not of pedagogy, but of hateful anti-Semitism and, quite frankly, cruelty toward children.
We have here a contemporary form of the medieval blood libel, a distortion of pedagogy that can only imbue in innocent children a disregard of violence and deep confusion about their own holiday. Is Christmas supposed to be celebrated in in the same mindset as the mass murder of innocent civilians? Cruelty to children, indeed!
As the investigation into the teacher’s “lesson” unfolded, it revealed that this “educator” had a history of fraud, had been stripped of her teaching license and had even been accused of animal cruelty. How did she get a job working at an elementary school as a librarian in a public school in the nation’s capital?
This is the uncomfortable question that DC Public Schools must confront, and must ensure does not recur.
DC Public Schools must also better oversee what kinds of lessons take place in its classrooms, particularly with difficult subjects. We dare say that issue is pertinent in school districts everywhere.
This “educator” aside, that is, discounting for a moment a teacher who has clearly crossed all boundaries, we are nonetheless left with a critical issue: The teaching of subjects that have inequalities as part of their story is becoming ever more complicated. Schools today feel they must not only aim to teach the events of the past, but to imbue the facts with values, such as anti-racism and respect for diversity. That desire, however admirable, often comes at the expense of crowding out the pedagogy, of selecting facts, of simplifying context, of ignoring mitigating factors such as contemporaneous opponents of ignoble deeds.
As we as a society seek to better understand our past, there is an impulse to make this collective reckoning a part of a child’s education from day one. As important as it is to teach the full range of lessons from the past, it is even more important not to traumatize the children of the present unnecessarily. If children in elementary school are not taught the horrors of slavery, of the Holocaust, of the Cambodian genocide, of Rwanda, it is not a shortcoming of public education. It is a recognition that children have not yet developed the emotional and mental capacity to understand and process such horrors. After all, what adult can understand and process them? A society cannot unload on its children to absolve itself.
In recent years, educators have grappled with these questions. More thoughtful, age-appropriate re-sources have been created to start to address the tough topics at a young age. As age-appropriate as these resources might be, the question remains: To what extent are these topics necessary at all for elementary age children? Life brings its own death of innocence. How one is able to cope with it depends in large measure on one’s fundamental attitude and education, formed at a young age. Is it productive of a young child’s emergent mind to be stressed with the evils of history?
For example, does a third grader really need to know who Adolf Hitler was? Can a fifth grader grasp the Holocaust? In elementary school, children are starting to learn about other countries and cultures, and starting to form an understanding that their own world isn’t the whole world. Don’t they need to grasp that before they can then understand wickedness of the leaders of some of these countries? Is a “crime against humanity” a desideratum for a fourth grade? That’s a lot to take in as a eight- or nine-year-old; rare is the eight- or nine-year-old with the emotional and mental capacity to process that.
Take an example from Judaic studies. Would we teach the Book of Judges — rife as it is with war and violent sexual assault — to third graders? It is part of Hebrew Bible, and there is a time and place to learn it, but third grade isn’t it.
Once upon a time in the Jewish community, at least here in Denver, most children learned about the Holocaust from the very people in our community who had survived it. It was traumatizing, but it was also organic and authentic. With a dwindling number of survivors among us, this primary resource for teaching and learning the lessons of the past is not one we can count on. So it is incumbent upon all of us, and Jewish educators are doing this, to find ways to convey the tragedies of our past without traumatizing children.
What we can say, without a shadow of a doubt, is that violent reenactments, such as the one in DC, will never be the way. They are gratuitously cruel and vividly inappropriate. A child can be so traumatized as to prevent him or her from ever engaging in the difficult topic in a way that may bring them understanding and a connection to the past. In the worst case, a child can learn that violence is an acceptable alternative.
DC Public Schools must investigate this incident to the full extent, and now has the unenviable task of working with the students who had to live through that “lesson” to ensure this doesn’t leave a permanent stain.
There’s theater and there’s school.
The two should not be confused.
Copyright © 2021 by the Intermountain Jewish News
