How to Teach the Holocaust

Translated by Nina Fink, Isabelle Dautresme Publié le
How to Teach the Holocaust
Formation des enseignants à l'histoire de la Shoah : visite du camp d'Auschwitz // ©  Isabelle Dautresme
How should history and geography teachers approach the Holocaust? To help answer this question, the Paris-based Shoah Memorial send French teachers on educational trips to Poland. EducPros went behind the scenes to learn more about this program.

Though the Memorial's program started in 2008, the 2015 terrorist attacks made it clear that many French teachers still struggle to teach secularism, racism, antisemitism and the Holocaust. Most of their teaching programs never trained them on the Holocaust. According to Shoah Memorial Training Coordinator Alban Perrin, "Many teachers have mixed-up or even incorrect ideas about it."

So it was that one fine day in March, roughly forty middle and high school teachers and school district officials left their schools in Nantes to spend four days learning how to teach the Holocaust. At the introduction in Krakow, one teacher whispered, "I was wrong to think I'd mastered this topic." "I've been giving my students incorrect information for years," lamented another. For Perrin, the problem is that "teaching programs are vague. For example, they wrongly equate the Holocaust with war crimes. And textbooks are always two steps behind." Looking at drawings made by Auschwitz survivors, Christophe Tarricone, the head trainer on the trip, told the teachers, "You could use this kind of material in your classes."

I'll never teach the Holocaust the same way again.

After the 2015 attacks, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, the French Minister of Education, Higher Education, and Research, decreed that schools should promote French Republican values. Perrin explains, "When we started eight years ago, certain school officials were reluctant to dedicate four days to the Holocaust. Some didn't see it as a priority and some even thought we made too much of it." Today, they rarely decline. For Tarricone, "School officials have finally realized that it's not just the 'lost territories of the French Republic' that are battling [antisemitism and conspiracy theories]."

At the end of the trip, one teacher captured his colleagues' sentiments, saying, "I'll never teach the Holocaust the same way again." Others wondered whether they should bring their students to Poland. Alban Perrin already had plans to visit them in Nantes to see "what they had retained."

Read the article (in French)

Translated by Nina Fink, Isabelle Dautresme | Publié le