A critical assessment of a landmark study

ABSTRACT

This article critically assesses a landmark study undertaken by the UCL Centre for Holocaust Education, What Do Students Know and Understand about the Holocaust? Analyzing the wealth of information offered by the study, the author widens the lens to contextualize the importance of this empirical research. At the same time, she critiques the gendered foci of the study design and suggests other fruitful perspectives. And she argues that this study is a key first step, with the results showing a clear path forward.

KEYWORDS:

• Holocaust education
• teaching and learning about the Holocaust
• classroom education
• student knowledge
• Holocaust
• Jews
• Nazi
• individual agency
• wartime rescue

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Debórah Dwork is Rose Professor of Holocaust History and Founding Director of the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. She is a highly respected scholar, author of the classic work Children With a Star, and co-author with Robert Jan van Pelt of Auschwitz. Debórah has also written on Jewish refugees, and Theresienstadt.

Notes

1. JTA, “Gore Urges,” 18.

2. Combe, “Prince Leads Holocaust Memorial.”

3. Annan, “The Myth of ‘Never Again’.”

4. Foster et al., What Do Students Know, 1.

5. Ibid., 1.

6. Clark, “Teachers Drop the Holocaust.” This was picked up by a number of American sites including, for example, the Daily Kos, 12 April 2007.

7. Foster et al., What Do Students Know, 81.

8. Ibid., 81–2.

9. Ibid., 107–11.

10. For a short history of the Holocaust that addresses this and other issues the study covered, see Dwork and van Pelt, Holocaust.

11. Inmates in institutions for the disabled in East and West Prussia and the Wartheland, by contrast, were gassed in a truck operated by a Sonderkommando, or Special Squad, headed by SS-Hauptsturmfuehrer Herbert Lange.

12. Foster et al., What Do Students Know, 112–8.

13. Ibid., 128–9.

14. Ibid., 125–33.

15. Ibid., 149–51.

16. Ibid., 158–65.

17. Ibid., 175.

18. Ibid., 189–92.

19. Ibid., 195.

20. Ibid., 179.

21. Ibid., 194.

22. Ibid., 183–9.

23. Ibid., 210. See too Pettigrew et al., Teaching About the Holocaust.

24. Ibid., 85.

25. Ibid., 86.

26. Rather, “A History Lesson.”

27. Foster et al., What Do Students Know, 86–90.

28. For an elaboration of these ideas, see Dwork and van Pelt, “A Distant Shore.”

29. Sara Grossman-Weil, oral history conducted by Debórah Dwork, Malverne, NY, 29–30 April 1987, transcript 29–31.

30. Dwork, Voices and Views. See, especially, xi–xvi, 3–7.

31. United Kingdom Holocaust Memorial Foundation, National Memorial and Learning Centre, 3. See also reiteration of this intent: United Kingdom Holocaust Memorial Foundation, “Press Release.”