A rock and a mountainside

From a student’s paper:

“After World War I, everyone in Germany was suffering except the Jews. Hitler could not figure out how they were the only ones not going through a depression....In an attempt to do that (purify the world), he created a concentration camp. The concentration camp included those with Down syndrome, African Americans, and Jews”

After having ranted and raged at a co-worker about this fragment, written some very fierce comments in the margin, and brought up the apparent lack of a proper history curriculum in Georgia secondary education with my coordinator, I have nothing left but to be absolutely gobsmacked by the above paragraph.

So how did this come about? Well, I teach a class on propaganda, where one of the assignment is to watch a German propaganda movie and analyze it in terms of propaganda tactics. During the screening I got some very unexpected questions about the war. Questions such as when the second world war began, why it started, what the Jews had to do with it, and how Japan tied into it all. I diligently gave what I assumed to be a brief refresher course on the basics of the second world war. I assumed the students had learned all of this (my kids learned about the holocaust as early as second grade), and had merely forgotten the details among all the other important things they have to keep track of, such as who is dating whom, when the next kegger is, and which club is the hottest in town. But this paragraph really made me wonder if students, and this student in particular, truly understand the basics of one of the worst wars the world has ever seen.

I know that among my students, slavery, the civil war, segregation, and the civil rights movement has always held a primary position in their understanding of American history. After all, these developments defined who and where they are today. However, to state that the Jews were the only ones not suffering after the first world war is ignorant at best, and anti-semitic at worst. And to not understand that world war two was actually a battle where African Americans were not the victims, and to relegate the main victims of that war to a third place in a list where the other the one other target group was never as high high on the Germans’ list (people with Down’s Syndrome) is almost offensive.

I know the student meant no harm. I know this is probably the result of poor education. But part of me also realizes it’s a result of students simply not caring. In their world view, 1940 was a hundred years ago, and the present is far more interesting than something that has only been captured in grainy black-and-white film. And for me that attitude is almost impossible to swallow. The ignorance that fueled the second world war, was the same that allowed segregation, lynchings and racism to persist for so long. How is it that a few students, in spite of all of my explaining, lecturing, and ranting, don’t understand that?

When I visited Auschwitz a few years ago, I took many things away from it, but one lesson I will remember for the rest of my life: Everyone is capable of such atrocities. If you are taught all the wrong (or right I suppose) things, and are cut off from all alternative voices, you too could become programmed into believing some people are simply not human, and thus don’t deserve to be treated as such. And it all starts with ignorance. Not knowing the facts, and not caring about the facts. Only complete understanding of our past, and all of it, can help us prevent such horrors from ever occurring again.

Sometimes I feel like Sisyphus. With a very large rock and an endless mountainside.