Neural Gourmet Archives | Feed Your Brain
Neural Gourmet Archives | Feed Your BrainThere was a truly terrifying story tucked inside today's Guardian newspaper:
Schools drop Holocaust lessons
Schools have avoided teaching the Holocaust and the Crusades in history lessons because they are concerned about causing offence to Muslim pupils or challenging "charged" versions of history which children have been taught at home, government research has found.
A report for the Department for Education and Skills found that a history department in a northern city had avoided selecting the Holocaust as a GCSE topic for fear of confronting "anti-semitic sentiment and Holocaust denial" among some Muslim pupils.
Another school decided to teach the Holocaust despite anti-semitic sentiment among students, but avoided the Crusades as "their balanced treatment of the topic would have directly challenged what was taught in some local mosques".
The report, Teaching Emotive and Controversial History, also revealed that one school was challenged by Christian parents for teachers' treatment of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Surely one of the chief duties of education is to confront and overcome prejudices and myths that have been learned in the home? It's incredible that some schools have dodged controversial parts of the cirriculum in this manner. These are only isloated incidents and may no be indicative of a broader problem, and this report was prepared as schools get ready for compulsory lessons on the Holocaust, so at least proliferation of anti-semitic myths in that area will soon be checked.
But this report does not bode well for the government's strategy on "faith schools". Are we to believe that they will be bold enough to tackle important, but controversial to some, areas such as evolution? Education can and should be a force for social cohesion, bringing all the diverse parts of society together in understanding and tolerance - but the British system appears to be drifting away from that. And, disgracefully, this is under a Labour government. Roll on June, and a new direction perhaps ...
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There does seem to be a chance of the reintroduction of sectarianism into mainland Great Britain resulting from this nonsense. However I am glad that Holocaust studies will be made compulsory from next year, but a close eye will need be kept on how it is taught and whether anti-Semitism is allowed to still be tolerated in some schools.
I am all for tackling Islamophobia, but it does not equate with massaging the ego of ethno-nationalism by tip-toeing around the Holocaust issue.
