tag:theconversation.com,2011:/africa/topics/history-teaching-9827/articlesHistory teaching – The Conversation2021-07-15T23:59:57Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1645532021-07-15T23:59:57Z2021-07-15T23:59:57ZFrom Parihaka to He Puapua: it’s time Pākehā New Zealanders faced their personal connections to the past<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/411364/original/file-20210715-17-11bbyuo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=10%2C0%2C7255%2C2418&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">An 1880s illustration of the village at Parihaka, sitting beneath Mt Taranaki.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">GettyImages</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Whenever I visit my mother in New Plymouth we drive out around the Taranaki coast to visit the old family farms, chugging along the South Road that was built to carry the armed constabulary (AC) and sundry volunteer forces that invaded <a href="https://nzhistory.govt.nz/occupation-pacifist-settlement-at-parihaka">Parihaka</a> on November 5 1881.</p>
<p>My great-grandfather, who joined the AC in 1877 and served in it for nine years, worked on that road. He was standing alongside 1,588 other men as the sun rose on the morning of <a href="https://taranaki.iwi.nz/our-history/te-tau-o-te-pahuatanga-the-pahua/">te Pāhua</a> (the sacking). </p>
<p>By the time he left the pā three years later he had participated in the assault on Parihaka, the weeks and months of despoliation that followed, and the years of occupation as the colonial government and its forces knelt on the throats of the people led by <a href="https://teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/2t34/te-whiti-o-rongomai-iii-erueti">Te Whiti-o-Rongomai</a> and <a href="https://nzhistory.govt.nz/people/tohu-kakahi">Tohu Kākahi</a>.</p>
<p>Having contributed to the military campaign, several years later he returned as part of the agricultural campaign to complete the alienation of Taranaki iwi from their land. </p>
<p>In time, he and his wife would own two farms on the coast. One of these had previously been returned to Māori via a Crown grant said to be “absolutely inalienable”, which turned out to be anything but.</p>
<p>They also leased a third property under the <a href="https://teatiawa.iwi.nz/history/the-public-trustee/">baleful West Coast lease system</a> which, among other things, excluded Māori landowners from the process of negotiating rent, gave them peppercorn rentals and locked them out of their land in perpetuity. All three farms were part of the 1,199,622 acres of land confiscated from Māori – “rebel” and loyalist alike – by executive decree in 1865.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/411369/original/file-20210715-17-1jcb8v4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Armed constabulary awaiting orders to advance on Parihaka Pa" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/411369/original/file-20210715-17-1jcb8v4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/411369/original/file-20210715-17-1jcb8v4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=452&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/411369/original/file-20210715-17-1jcb8v4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=452&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/411369/original/file-20210715-17-1jcb8v4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=452&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/411369/original/file-20210715-17-1jcb8v4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=568&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/411369/original/file-20210715-17-1jcb8v4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=568&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/411369/original/file-20210715-17-1jcb8v4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=568&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Armed constabulary awaiting orders to advance on Parihaka pā, 1881.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Alexander Turnbull Library</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/">CC BY-NC</a></span>
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<h2>An unsettled history</h2>
<p>I can already feel the defensively minded scrabbling together the usual case for avoiding this uncomfortable history — eulogising hard-working settlers as the <a href="https://teara.govt.nz/en/rural-mythologies/page-3">backbone of the nation</a>, bemoaning the <a href="https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/441697/he-puapua-report-collins-called-divisive-meant-to-create-unity-author-says">creeping “separatism” of He Puapua</a>, <a href="https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/owairakamt-albert-tree-protesters-slammed-as-woke-entitled-pakeha-at-maunga-hui/W2GXY43LYJYPMFAVTGUYOGSWHE/">“woke” Pākehā</a>, and being made to feel <a href="https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/political/417671/judith-collins-sick-of-being-demonised-for-her-ethnicity">guilty for being a European</a> New Zealander. </p>
<p>There’s a lot of this about at the moment, but it needs to stop. It only enables the evasion of hard truths about the history and contemporary impacts of colonisation in this country — one of which is that for many Pākehā, me included, our time here began on land that had been stolen (sorry, “confiscated”) from the people to whom it belonged.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/411366/original/file-20210715-21-bltk55.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="1880 map of the Taranaki coast showing the area of 'confiscated' territory" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/411366/original/file-20210715-21-bltk55.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/411366/original/file-20210715-21-bltk55.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=729&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/411366/original/file-20210715-21-bltk55.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=729&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/411366/original/file-20210715-21-bltk55.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=729&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/411366/original/file-20210715-21-bltk55.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=917&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/411366/original/file-20210715-21-bltk55.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=917&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/411366/original/file-20210715-21-bltk55.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=917&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">An 1880 map of the Taranaki coast showing the area of ‘confiscated’ territory.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Puke Ariki</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
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<p>My great-grandfather and his wife eventually controlled 412 acres of Taranaki land, on which a small economic and social revolution took place. For a start, the three farms allowed my great-grandparents to transform themselves from poor Irish migrants into settler landowners. </p>
<p>The scale of the economic transformation was breathtaking. My great-grandfather was one of ten children, the son of tenant farmers who paid £26 and ten shillings a year to the local (English) squire for the lease on a 29-acre tenement in Kilteely parish in the east of County Limerick. </p>
<p>When he died, the combined property he and his wife held sway over on the Taranaki coast was 16 times the size of the farm he was born on, and nearly 17% larger than the total amount of land the absentee English landlord owned in Kilteely.</p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-nzs-colonial-government-misused-laws-to-crush-non-violent-dissent-at-parihaka-126495">How NZ's colonial government misused laws to crush non-violent dissent at Parihaka</a>
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<h2>From tenants to landed gentry</h2>
<p>The land also enabled my great-grandparents to reinvent themselves as respected members of the local farming community. My great-grandfather played the violin at the annual district bachelors’ ball in 1895, where the “refreshments were all that one could wish for” and the dancing “commenced punctually at 8pm and did not break up until nearly 4am”. </p>
<p>He won first place in the rhubarb section of the farm and garden produce division of the Cape Egmont Horticultural Society’s third annual show in 1901 (and took out top place in the ham section a year later). And he became a stalwart of the Rahotu Athletics Club and the Pungarehu School Board. </p>
<p>He was born the son of an Irish tenant farmer and died a landowning British settler. It is an extraordinary economic and social transformation in a single generation.</p>
<p>And it is built upon land that the colonial state had taken from other people.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/my-ancestors-met-cook-in-aotearoa-250-years-ago-for-us-its-time-to-reinterpret-a-painful-history-128771">My ancestors met Cook in Aotearoa 250 years ago. For us, it's time to reinterpret a painful history</a>
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<p>Not only did the original inhabitants lose their land, they and their descendants have also been denied the material wealth that has subsequently been generated from that land. I can’t yet accurately quantify the full value of the economic returns that accrued to my great-grandparents and their six children, but I do have a couple of snapshots that illustrate the general point I’m trying to make.</p>
<p>First, at the time they were purchased by my great-grandparents, the combined value of the two farms owned outright was roughly NZ$400,000 in today’s terms. Not one dollar went directly to the original owners of the land.</p>
<p>Second, in his will, one of my great-grandfather’s sons, who was a Roman Catholic priest and who died young, left nearly $30,000 to the church and just under $200,000 to his two sisters. We’re up to $630,000 in transactions already (and haven’t even looked at the revenues earned through the farms) — but none of this activity benefited those from whom the land was taken.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/411370/original/file-20210715-27-15n18y9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Burial place of Parihaka founder Te Whiti with moon rising above" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/411370/original/file-20210715-27-15n18y9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/411370/original/file-20210715-27-15n18y9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/411370/original/file-20210715-27-15n18y9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/411370/original/file-20210715-27-15n18y9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/411370/original/file-20210715-27-15n18y9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=504&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/411370/original/file-20210715-27-15n18y9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=504&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/411370/original/file-20210715-27-15n18y9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=504&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The burial place of Parihaka founder Te Whiti-o-Rongomai at the marae near Opunake, West Taranaki.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">GettyImages</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Wealth and dispossession</h2>
<p>That wealth has echoed down through time, supporting the endeavours of later generations. It lies behind the purchase of other properties and houses, bequests to daughters and sons, support with the costs of education — all the things Professor Christine Sleeter, an education activist, calls the “<a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/42982062">financial footholds and cushions</a>” families try to provide to subsequent generations. </p>
<p>And each of these has its own multiplier effect, which is why the inter-generational transfer of wealth is such a critical factor in people’s socioeconomic well-being (or lack thereof). Merit and hard work play a part in this, but there is no avoiding – in my case – that it all began with the dispossession of Māori.</p>
<p>That land gifted us something else, too. My people have long since moved away from the coast but our origin story will forever be there. That is where it began for us in Aotearoa. Where my great-uncle, who completed a doctorate of divinity in Rome at the age of 21, was born. Where my grandfather established himself as a powerful figure in Taranaki rugby. Where my mother grew up and escaped from, meeting my father in the process. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/why-its-time-for-new-zealanders-to-learn-more-about-their-own-countrys-history-123527">Why it's time for New Zealanders to learn more about their own country's history</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>That land gave my ancestors a place of their own on which to stand. It is where we began the process of becoming Pākehā.</p>
<p>This is what privilege looks like. Not historical at all, as it happens, but something that is very much alive and well. Not to do with events that I have no association with, but concerning processes that continue to spool out and from which I benefit. Not disconnected from the colonisation of this country, but utterly rooted in it. Bluntly, my historical privilege is grounded in the <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/321136351_Conceptualising_historical_privilege_the_flip_side_of_historical_trauma_a_brief_examination">historical trauma</a> experienced by Māori.</p>
<p>Curiously, however, not one of the stories of the coast I grew up with spoke of my great-grandfather’s presence at Parihaka or carried the history of the family farms. </p>
<h2>Ending the forgetting</h2>
<p>I doubt I am alone in having these partial family stories. I’m not the only Pākehā who has much preferred the standard settler account of thrusting progress and economic productivity, one which dances lightly over the confiscation, theft and violence that lie beneath the surface.</p>
<p>For the better part of my life I have happily lived in what historian and author Rachel Buchanan calls the “<a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/277747143_The_Dementia_Wing_of_History">dementia wing</a>” of our country’s history, choosing to forget (or never to learn, which amounts to much the same thing) what happened at Parihaka, comfortable in the knowledge my history here began with the purchase of the family farms.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-the-great-australian-silence-50-years-on-100737">Friday essay: the 'great Australian silence' 50 years on</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>And although forgetting is usually associated with loss, in my experience there was much to be gained from forgetting (or avoiding) my connection with the AC, the sacking of Parihaka and the purchase of land taken from others: ease of mind, and that tacit sense of relief that comes from steering clear of something you know is going to be difficult to confront.</p>
<p>There’s a reason we need a new <a href="https://www.education.govt.nz/assets/Documents/Aotearoa-NZ-histories/MOE-Aotearoa-NZ-Histories-A3-FINAL-020-1.pdf">national histories curriculum</a>, a reason the government must get to grips with its <a href="https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/un-declaration-maori-self-determination-to-bring-us-together-willie-jackson-says/2452HD43OSXT6AUNMILBVUDJZI/">obligations to tangata whenua</a>. The reason is people like me. I still recognise myself in the bleating of those who ignore the colonial violation of Māori, and in the words of people who are all too happy to extol <a href="https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/politics/2021/06/colonisation-a-good-thing-for-m-ori-on-balance-national-mp-paul-goldsmith.html">the benefits of colonisation</a> but whose eyes glaze over when the talk turns to the theft of land. </p>
<p>But it is long since time we Pākehā confronted the unsettled history of the place in which the “team of five million” lives. Time we were honest with ourselves. Time we ended the forgetting.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/164553/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Richard Shaw does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>This year marks 140 years since Parihaka pā was sacked. As He Puapua reignites the debate about the impacts of colonisation, how do the descendants of early European settlers respond?Richard Shaw, Professor of Politics, Massey UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1165782019-05-30T12:48:55Z2019-05-30T12:48:55ZI was an expert witness against a teacher who taught students to question the Holocaust<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/276412/original/file-20190524-187189-fltgc2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=80%2C723%2C2704%2C970&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Adolf Hitler (second from the right in front) is shown in this 1939 file photo along with German and Italian army chiefs after having signed the German-Italian military pact in Germany.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Germany-Holocaust/1ee6c974c28d4b76bf1b13f166f8472e/19/0">AP</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>Editor’s note: This article was published in 2019. Jason Mostafa Ali, the subject of the article, died in early 2023.</em></p>
<p>When I first set out to research how the Holocaust was being depicted in textbooks in New Jersey’s public schools, my hope was to see what students were being taught about the <a href="https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/introduction-to-the-holocaust">systematic state-sponsored killing</a> of 6 million Jewish men, women and and children.</p>
<p>I never imagined that <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00377996.2018.1515060">my work</a> would lead me to serve as a witness against a history teacher who encouraged his students to question whether the Holocaust had ever taken place at all.</p>
<p>The case – known as <a href="https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/new-jersey/njdce/2:2017cv02210/346734/32/">Jason Mostafa Ali v. Woodbridge Township School District</a> – represents a rare look inside the mind of what I see as a modern day Holocaust denier. In some ways, the case is reminiscent of <a href="https://www.hdot.org/trial-materials/">Irving v. Penguin and Lipstadt</a> – a Holocaust denial case famously portrayed in the <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4645330/">2016 movie “Denial”</a> and written about in a <a href="https://www.harpercollins.com/9780062659651/denial/">book</a> of the same name.</p>
<p>In that case, Emory University history professor Deborah Lipstadt was sued for libel in a London court by author David Irving, a well-known writer about WWII. Irving filed the libel suit after Lipstadt wrote a book called “Denying the Holocaust,” in which she called Irving “<a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2001/04/16/blood-libel">one of the most dangerous spokespersons for Holocaust denial</a>.” A British court ultimately tossed out Irving’s suit, finding that he had <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2000/apr/12/irving.uk1">“persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence”</a> in order to portray Hitler in “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2000/apr/12/irving.uk1">unwarrantedly favourable light</a>.”</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/276409/original/file-20190524-187179-3ttwoy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/276409/original/file-20190524-187179-3ttwoy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/276409/original/file-20190524-187179-3ttwoy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=802&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/276409/original/file-20190524-187179-3ttwoy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=802&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/276409/original/file-20190524-187179-3ttwoy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=802&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/276409/original/file-20190524-187179-3ttwoy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1008&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/276409/original/file-20190524-187179-3ttwoy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1008&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/276409/original/file-20190524-187179-3ttwoy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1008&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Author David Irving claimed that Deborah Lipstadt, professor of modern Jewish history and Holocaust studies at Emory University in Atlanta, had alleged in a 1994 book that he denied the Holocaust.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Associated-Press-International-News-United-King-/e400033561e5da11af9f0014c2589dfb/21/0">Max Nash/AP</a></span>
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<p>Now here I was some two decades later, being called upon to serve as a witness against a schoolteacher trying to get his job back after being fired for doing essentially the same thing.</p>
<p>My grandparents were Holocaust survivors. I have also spent the past four years interviewing children and other grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=list_works&hl=en&user=tB-wZZ0AAAAJ&gmla=AJsN-F7JadL94mD5fk4DKGGymKzG63Xj9716soFSGsgmhkr1sL1taPq8geaE6ZoxBBPF7zTVg5eE70iYyk4oS2D98wpIFUSOWRCxvYQSr1NT8LKERJiGp1k">My work</a> shows how deeply members of the second and third generations feel the impact of the Holocaust in their lives. Many often feel like they <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17504902.2017.1406701?scroll=top&needAccess=true&journalCode=rhos20">carry the trauma</a> that parents and grandparents experienced. I had to work to keep my emotions in check and focus on the business at hand.</p>
<h2>Denial makes news</h2>
<p>My involvement in the case against Mr. Ali began in November 2017 when I got a phone call from a lawyer who was representing the Woodbridge Township School District. I had sent an email earlier in the year to the district about my study of how textbooks portray the Holocaust and officials there remembered my note. </p>
<p>Woodbridge officials had fired Mr. Ali, who was teaching students to question the Holocaust and who was also pushing 9/11 conspiracy theories. Mr. Ali was now suing the district for illegally firing him <a href="https://patch.com/new-jersey/woodbridge/woodbridge-teacher-fired-over-9-11-conspiracies-sues-district-alleges-anti">over his race and religion</a>.</p>
<p>Mr. Ali had first made headlines in September 2016 after a news station <a href="https://pix11.com/2016/09/28/exclusive-woodbridge-high-school-teacher-removed-after-911-conspiracy-links-found-on-his-school-web-page/">discovered several 9/11 conspiracy links</a> on his school webpage.</p>
<p>After speaking with the Woodbridge district lawyer, I was sent several hundred pages of depositions, student work and lesson plans to review. I was also asked if I would serve as an expert witness in the case.</p>
<p>One particularly memorable student paper in the documents was called “A Gas Chamber Full of Lies.” </p>
<p>“We have all been taught that the Holocaust was a time of hate, and that Hitler used the gifts he possessed for absolute evil, but is that really the case? … Is the death of the Jews completely justified? No, because nobody deserves to die, regardless what they’ve done. But are their deaths really completely unjustified either?” read an excerpt.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/276410/original/file-20190524-187182-17o84hk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/276410/original/file-20190524-187182-17o84hk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/276410/original/file-20190524-187182-17o84hk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=461&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/276410/original/file-20190524-187182-17o84hk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=461&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/276410/original/file-20190524-187182-17o84hk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=461&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/276410/original/file-20190524-187182-17o84hk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=580&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/276410/original/file-20190524-187182-17o84hk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=580&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/276410/original/file-20190524-187182-17o84hk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=580&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Charred remains of bodies found by U.S. troops of the 80th Division in the furnace chamber at Buchenwald concentration camp, near Weimar, Germany, in April 1945.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Associated-Press-International-News-Germany-WWI-/1f94ada504f2da11af9f0014c2589dfb/53/0">AP Photo/U.S. Army Signal Corps</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Another student stated that the Jews imprisoned in concentration camps “had a much easier and more enjoyable life in the camps” and that “even though they were not at home, they felt like they were.”</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/276411/original/file-20190524-187185-bgapfy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/276411/original/file-20190524-187185-bgapfy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/276411/original/file-20190524-187185-bgapfy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=417&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/276411/original/file-20190524-187185-bgapfy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=417&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/276411/original/file-20190524-187185-bgapfy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=417&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/276411/original/file-20190524-187185-bgapfy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=524&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/276411/original/file-20190524-187185-bgapfy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=524&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/276411/original/file-20190524-187185-bgapfy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=524&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A picture taken just after the liberation by the Soviet army in January 1945 shows a group of children wearing concentration camp uniforms behind barbed wire fencing in the Oswiecim (Auschwitz) Nazi concentration camp.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/AP-PL-FILE-POL-HOLOCAUST-AUSCHWITZ/93b29d33a9e0da11af9f0014c2589dfb/37/0">AP</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Mr. Ali’s pedagogical folly was not limited to the Holocaust. He also shared links to stories that asserted that <a href="https://www.memri.org/reports/egyptian-daily-us-planning-911-style-attack-using-isis-early-2015-%E2%80%93-it-did-using-al-qaeda">9/11 was a conspiracy between the CIA and Mossad</a>. The stories had headlines like “<a href="https://www.memri.org/tv/saudi-scholar-abdallah-al-yahya-jews-are-cancer-woe-world-if-they-become-strong/transcript">The Jews are like a cancer, woe to the world if they become strong</a>.” </p>
<p>Confronted with this evidence, I decided to serve as an expert witness in the case.</p>
<h2>Taking on a ‘content specialist’</h2>
<p>In <a href="https://cdn.theconversation.com/static_files/files/610/Rich_Response_to_Ali_v_Woodbridge-1.pdf?1558706975">a report</a> to the court, I pointed out how – during a deposition – Mr. Ali made numerous factual errors and had a lack of knowledge about the Second World War and the Holocaust.</p>
<p>Mr. Ali did not know basic facts, such as the name of <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Erwin-Rommel">General Erwin Rommel</a>, one of the most prominent German generals of the war. He also was ignorant of <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1986/wiesel/biographical/">Elie Wiesel</a> or Wiesel’s classic book “<a href="https://www.scholastic.com/teachers/books/night-by-elie-wiesel/">Night</a>,” perhaps the best-known account of the Holocaust by an Auschwitz survivor.</p>
<p>These giant gaps in basic factual knowledge, I told the court, came along with what I described as a “worrisome awareness of arcane, conspiracy-related details, a classic case of losing the forest for the trees in historical terms.”</p>
<p>“By allowing his students to investigate assertions, myths, and logical fallacies as if they are real, Mr. Ali created the space for denial to grow,” I wrote in my report. “This allows the idea of ‘maybe there is more to this than I was told’ to bloom.”</p>
<h2>Where free speech stops</h2>
<p>In Mr. Ali’s <a href="https://cases.justia.com/federal/district-courts/new-jersey/njdce/2:2017cv02210/346734/32/0.pdf?ts=1556702477">case</a>, he alleged – among other things – that he had a First Amendment right to share materials that he saw fit.</p>
<p>When he was asked whether he taught his students to “question the facts as to whether Hitler chose to brutally abuse, take advantage, starve and murder Jews for absolutely no reason at all,” Mr. Ali responded that he taught his students to “question everything.” And when he was asked if he encouraged his students to “come to different views than the traditional understanding of what World War II and the Holocaust and Hitler were about,” he stated: “Yeah, it’s called debate.”</p>
<p>But United States District Judge Madeline Cox Arleo disagreed. She <a href="https://cases.justia.com/federal/district-courts/new-jersey/njdce/2:2017cv02210/346734/32/0.pdf?ts=1556702477">ruled</a> that the school district, not the classroom teacher, “has the ultimate right to decide what will be taught in the classroom.” Except for a procedural matter unrelated to his teaching, she tossed out the various claims in Mr. Ali’s lawsuit, saying that he failed to show he was fired for anything other than the reasons given by the school district – not his race or his religion like he claimed.</p>
<p>Mr. Ali is not done with this fight. Even though a judge tossed out his lawsuit, on May 28 he filed an appeal, <a href="https://cdn.theconversation.com/static_files/files/612/Plaintiff_s_notice_of_appeal.PDF?1559155553">court records show.</a></p>
<p>The Conversation reached out to Mr. Ali and his attorney, Nicholas Pompelio, but did not get a response. </p>
<p>I don’t doubt that Mr. Ali has a story to tell. I can’t speak to his <a href="https://patch.com/new-jersey/woodbridge/woodbridge-teacher-fired-over-9-11-conspiracies-sues-district-alleges-anti">claims</a> that he was subjected to an “anti-Muslim attitude” at work, or that the school district didn’t seem to have a problem with his 9/11 conspiracy theory lessons until a TV station started reporting about it.</p>
<p>All I know is that when it comes to what Mr. Ali either let or encouraged his students to believe when it comes to Hitler and the Holocaust, his lessons weren’t just wrong, they were dangerous.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/116578/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jennifer Rich does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>A scholar’s efforts to learn how textbooks in New Jersey were portraying the Holocaust leads her to testify against a history teacher who taught his students to question if the Holocaust took place.Jennifer Rich, Professor of Sociology, Rowan UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/870042017-11-09T19:20:52Z2017-11-09T19:20:52ZWhy children need to be taught to think critically about Remembrance Day<p>A few years ago, my then four-year-old daughter came home from preschool wanting to know who the soldiers were and why they died.</p>
<p>As a history teacher for nearly two decades, I thought I had it covered. This was my moment to shine as a parent and educator. Unfortunately, I had grossly overestimated my capabilities. I found myself stumbling over explanations and unable to find the words. Anyone who has tried knows it’s nearly impossible to describe to a four-year-old the machinations of war in a non-terrifying way. How would I unpack the complex cultural participation in commemorations? I resorted to telling her: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I’ll explain it when you’re older. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>I know, I know, shame on me. </p>
<p>But it got me thinking about how we position our students to engage meaningfully with wartime narratives and commemorations. I think we’re missing valuable opportunities to teach students how to critically evaluate memorialisation as a historical artefact. This deserves our attention because artefacts embody the ideological value systems of the community that create it and the society that, 100 years later, continues to use and observe it. In critiquing Remembrance Day, students will likely learn a great deal about the social and political customs of their own community. </p>
<h2>How do schools now participate in commemoration?</h2>
<p>What happens now is fairly straightforward. Schools will consult a website such as the <a href="http://anzacportal.dva.gov.au/">Australian Government Department of Veterans’ Affairs</a> to find a <a href="http://anzacportal.dva.gov.au/conduct-event">runsheet</a>. Students will be organised to speak, taking heed of the advice for the commemorative address to “<a href="http://anzacportal.dva.gov.au/conduct-event">highlight the service and sacrifice of men and women in all conflicts</a>”. A wreath may be purchased, a minute’s silence will be observed, and a recording of <a href="https://www.army.gov.au/our-history/traditions/the-last-post">The Last Post</a> and <a href="https://www.army.gov.au/our-history/traditions/the-rouse-and-the-reveille">The Rouse and the Reveille</a> will be played. </p>
<p>The concern is that uncritical engagement in the social act of commemoration is creating generations of historical tourists. These “tourists” are not enabled to understand that memorials and commemorative services are interpretations of the past, or that such services are a representation of how present-day society believes it should interact with that past. They simply pass through without understanding the full context. Asking pupils to organise and participate in a commemorative event, or providing red paper to make poppies, will not help students develop capacity to recognise that memorial sites and the framing of historical narratives are responses to the context of the time they were created. </p>
<h2>Why is this important?</h2>
<p>Memorials and commemorative services use rhetoric that speaks to national identities. Political leaders are adept at using these monuments, ceremonies and rhetoric to respond to current social anxieties in a way that often creates further divisions.</p>
<p>As historical tourists attending commemorative services, students (and the adults they grow into) are at risk of accepting without question nationalistic and political agendas that may not be in their best interests. I want my students and pre-service teachers to recognise the political, social, and economic factors that influence how a society conducts and participates in memorialisation of the past. Recognising and understanding this influence leads to active and proactive citizenship.</p>
<h2>Preparing our students</h2>
<p>How can teachers best prepare primary and secondary school students to think critically about memorialisation? Here is some sound advice from around the globe.</p>
<p><a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11125-010-9140-z">Monique Eckmann</a> from the <a href="https://www.hes-so.ch/en/homepage-hes-so-1679.html">University of Applied Sciences Western Switzerland</a> says:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>the history of memory has to be studied; it is important to understand the context and the history of the decision to create a memorial or a commemoration day. Which advocacy groups took the initiative to propose a memorial place or a commemorative date, when, and for whom? What groups were involved in memorialisation politics? What victims are named, who is mentioned in the official memory, and who is not included in it?</p>
</blockquote>
<p><a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.3200/TSSS.98.3.105-110">Alan S. Marcus</a>, assistant professor of curriculum and instruction at the <a href="https://education.uconn.edu/">Neag School of Education</a> at the University of Connecticut suggests: </p>
<ul>
<li><p>providing students with or asking them to research the public and private purposes and missions of the memorial, and asking students to discuss how they may influence what is displayed,</p></li>
<li><p>asking students to interview other visitors at the memorial to learn about their experiences and how those visitors understand the monument and the commemorative services conducted there.</p></li>
</ul>
<p><a href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/43259416">Barnaby Nemko</a>, Head of History at <a href="http://www.sthelens.london/">St Helen’s School</a> in Northwood, London, set his students the task of producing their own photographic memorial of the first world war, which would serve as a record for future generations. The aim was for pupils to construct their own First World War photo memorial based on what they experienced on their day trip to the site of <a href="http://www.greatwar.co.uk/ypres-salient/battles-ypres-salient.htm">Ypres</a>. Subsequently, the pupils would have to justify their choice of “exhibits”. </p>
<p>As a history teacher, I see great value in all these strategies. So I was surprised by the results of <a href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/43259416">Nemko’s</a> study. The work his students produced displayed a complete lack of understanding that the photographic memorial they created was indeed an interpretation of the past. He found that the historical monuments elicited such a strong emotional reaction from the students that it impaired their analytical skills, which were otherwise well developed in relation to other kinds of historical accounts.</p>
<h2>What about the place of commemoration in pre-school?</h2>
<p>My second child attends a different preschool. Fortunately, there are no commemorative activities offered at this centre. I am more than a little relieved. I avoid stumbling again through the murky waters of attempting to explain war and remembrance to a child under the age of five. More importantly, I just don’t think she’s ready to engage in the horrors of war and the complexities of how societies construct narratives to memorialise such events.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/87004/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Kim Wilson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Teaching students to recognise and understanding the political, social, and economic factors that influence how we celebrate Remembrance Day would make them more active citizens.Kim Wilson, Lecturer in History Education, Macquarie UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/705272017-01-24T19:18:39Z2017-01-24T19:18:39ZThe Australian history boom has busted, but there’s hope it may boom again<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/152782/original/image-20170116-11837-3ut1kn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The 1850s gold rush in Victoria brought an influx of prospectors from China, seeking their fortunes.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">National Museum of Australia</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>This is the first in a series examining Australian national identity, especially around the ongoing debate about Australia Day.</em></p>
<hr>
<p>Last month, my wife and I took our ten-year-old daughter to Sovereign Hill, that colourful re-creation of gold-rush Ballarat. Now almost half-a-century old, it remains a deservedly popular tourist attraction. It has also moved with the times. </p>
<p>There are many more knick-knacks for sale than I recall from my childhood – things have moved well beyond personalised wanted posters and boiled sweets – and it seems more representative of the history it purports to depict. The Chinese camp is striking. The creek is kept well supplied with gold specks for the latest generation of prospectors.</p>
<p>Then there is the evening sound-light display, Blood on the Southern Cross, which tells story of the Eureka Stockade. It is an impressive example of technical virtuosity and storytelling. </p>
<p>But as we sat watching Bentley’s Hotel being burned down, I couldn’t help but think of the overseas visitors in the audience, many of them, I presume, from places with histories soaked in blood. What did they make of “our own little rebellion”, as one historian has called it? Surely some must have wondered what the fuss was all about.</p>
<p>In 1982 <a href="http://www.patrickofarrell.com/">Patrick O’Farrell</a>, a history professor at the University of New South Wales, wrote an article for Quadrant with the intriguing title “Boredom as Historical Motivation”. It was a meandering effort, but O’Farrell did eventually get around to his own field, Australian history. He wrote:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>This has, as a body of knowledge, a marked capacity to produce intense boredom, and thus to spawn the historical malfunctions that boredom generates among its practitioners.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>If you consider that he was writing at a time when Australian history had made its way into every nook and cranny of the national culture, O’Farrell’s judgement seems odd. In the 1980s Australian history was flourishing in schools and universities. Genealogy was booming. </p>
<p>Australian history books did well and on occasion – as with Robert Hughes’s <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fatal_Shore">The Fatal Shore</a> – spectacularly. Peter Carey’s <a href="http://petercareybooks.com/all-titles/oscar-and-lucinda/">Oscar and Lucinda</a>, mainly set in colonial New South Wales, won a Booker Prize. </p>
<p>Historians – a few of them at least – were seen frequently in the media. TV mini-series screened on a bewildering variety of historical topics. The First Fleet re-enactment would soon be sailing into Sydney Harbour for the Bicentenary of 1988, Coca-Cola logo and all.</p>
<p>O’Farrell had an answer: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>The recent swing to interest in Australian history may be, to some extent, a sign of social malaise and vigour, of the narrow superficiality and materialism now dominant in men’s lives.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>While I doubt that the early 1980s was notably more inclined to such vices than any other era, we can now more easily recognise the context that produced the Australian history boom. It was part of a declaration of independence associated with the end of the British Empire in the 1960s. There were similar developments in Canada, New Zealand, India, the Caribbean and even, arguably, within Britain itself, with the rise of Scottish and Welsh nationalism.</p>
<p>That era of post-imperial “new nationalism” is well behind us, but what has this meant for Australian history? It is surely still a major presence in the public sphere. Conservatives, probably even more than in the 1980s, worry over what is being taught in schools and universities. Manning Clark’s Akubra has given way to Peter FitzSimons’ red bandana. Geoffrey Blainey will be quoted in the paper on home-grown Muslim terrorism rather than, as in the 1980s, on Asian immigration.</p>
<p>If all of this suggests continuity – and one example of such continuity is surely the media and publishing industries’ promotion of the Great White Man as National Historian-cum-Prophet – there are also some obvious changes. </p>
<p>The space for a critical history has shrunk. Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds have <a href="https://www.newsouthbooks.com.au/books/whats-wrong-with-anzac/">criticised</a> “the militarisation of Australian history”, but the rise of Anzac is possibly as much a symptom as a cause of this shrinkage. </p>
<p>Certainly, popular war stories, whether of the sentimental or the ripping Aussie yarn variety, do carry a great deal less lead in the saddlebag when it comes to finding publishers, audiences and other forms of public recognition. But this narrowing of focus is part of a larger shift.</p>
<p>The rise of Australian history from the 1960s to the 1980s coincided with the rise of a critical social history, stimulated by international influences (especially British, American, Indian, French, Italian), that gave voice and agency to women, Indigenous people, the working class, immigrants, and ethnic and sexual minorities. </p>
<p>That presented the face of Australian history with a strangely divided personality. It fostered a sense of national distinctiveness and belonging, even as it drew attention to diversity, exclusion and discrimination and cast a critical eye over national stereotypes. </p>
<p>My feeling is that this was, and remains, a powerful creative and intellectual tension – I am thinking here of its presence in the work of <a href="https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/books/general-books/history/Australias-War-1914-18-Edited-by-Joan-Beaumont-9781863734615">Joan Beaumont on the first world war</a>, <a href="https://www.textpublishing.com.au/books/the-forgotten-rebels-of-eureka">Clare Wright on the women of Eureka</a>, and Stuart Macintyre on the <a href="https://www.newsouthbooks.com.au/books/australias-boldest-experiment/">bold experiment of post-war reconstruction</a>: all award-winning authors and books of recent years.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, for those of us working in universities, there is the problem of getting bums on seats. The space occupied in the 1980s media by the Great White Male Historian-Prophet is increasingly now the property of international relations scholars, anti-terrorism specialists and security experts – although they’re still usually white blokes. </p>
<p>History, like several other humanities and social science disciplines, bleeds enrolments to international relations, which many students see as more “relevant” to their world and a smoother pathway to a “global” career – as well as being more in line with their increasingly mobile lives and cosmopolitan identities.</p>
<p>All the same, I was interested in the conversation I overheard between a young woman and a sales assistant in a Ballarat bookshop. The woman – probably in her twenties – had clearly enjoyed the Chinese camp at Sovereign Hill: did the store have anything on the Chinese in Australia? </p>
<p>The assistant couldn’t really suggest a title; clearly, the large collection of popular military histories on the shelf wasn’t going to be much help. The last time I spotted her she was thumbing through a copy of Geoffrey Blainey’s latest.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>Catch up on other pieces in the series <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/topics/the-australian-national-identity-35033">here</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/70527/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Frank Bongiorno does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Historians may not be the media stars they were in the 1980s, but understanding our history remains vital to understanding ourselves.Frank Bongiorno, Professor of History, ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences, Australian National UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/436632015-07-02T04:19:44Z2015-07-02T04:19:44ZHow history textbooks can be used to build kids’ empathy<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/86262/original/image-20150624-31504-1vxacco.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Children develop based on their interactions with people, books and cultural artefacts. History textbooks could have a great deal to teach them about empathy.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">From www.shutterstock.com</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In the 21 years since apartheid was scrapped in South Africa there has been a great deal of discussion about how the country can heal and progress. This is an <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/13/opinion/the-end-of-the-rainbow-nation-myth.html?_r=0">often fraught</a> conversation that is happening in many spaces - including school history classrooms.</p>
<p>In its curriculum statement, the Department of Basic Education <a href="http://www.education.gov.za/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=F99lepqD6vs%3D&tabid=570&mid=1558">says</a> high school history students should be taught to recognise that “there is often more than one perspective of a historical event”. </p>
<p>If history is well taught, the department suggests, a learner should develop the ability:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>… to imagine oneself being in that time in the past and (use) information from that time to think like someone from the past. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>This is a fair <a href="http://empathylibrary.com/what-is-empathy">working definition</a> of empathy. So could history textbooks offer young South Africans the opportunity to develop their own sense of empathy?</p>
<p>To find out, I <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13642529.2014.898815">analysed</a> one chapter in six Grade 11 history textbooks. The chapter in question <a href="http://v1.sahistory.org.za/pages/hands-on-classroom/classroom/curriculum-draft-grade10-12.htm#grade11">examines</a> the impact of pseudo-scientific racism and Social Darwinism on the 19th and 20th centuries. It explores how these theories affected thinking about race and racism in Africa, the US, Australia and Europe, and how they ultimately led to genocide in Nazi Germany.</p>
<p>I wanted to know how the textbooks discursively constructed the past to allow the reader to imagine different social and emotional contexts – and how, if at all, the material taught learners to think with empathy. </p>
<h2>Through the eyes of others</h2>
<p>There were two main literacy devices used to mediate empathy in these textbooks. The first involved showing different perspectives of events and variation within these. The second centred on the use of primary narratives and sources.</p>
<p>Here is a perpertrator’s perspective from one textbook:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I had learned from the example of my parents that one could have anti-Semitic opinions without this interfering in one’s personal relations with individual Jews. </p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/86263/original/image-20150624-31498-13q9qlw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/86263/original/image-20150624-31498-13q9qlw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86263/original/image-20150624-31498-13q9qlw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86263/original/image-20150624-31498-13q9qlw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86263/original/image-20150624-31498-13q9qlw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86263/original/image-20150624-31498-13q9qlw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86263/original/image-20150624-31498-13q9qlw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The entrance to Auschwitz concentration camp. Perpetrators’ stories can teach children about different aspects of history and develop their ability to empathise.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">From shutterstock.com</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The perpetrator continues by trying to understand how this “confusion” led him to dedicate “body and soul to an inhuman political system without this giving me doubts about my own individual decency”. This deeply personal story will resonate with anyone who holds bigoted attitudes while remaining convinced of their own decency because they interact unproblematically with “the other” on an individual basis. </p>
<p>Learners can relate to this speaker on some level because everyone struggles with conflicting thoughts and attitudes. This account directs learners to look within themselves and consider that the problem might start right there – a step towards building empathy.</p>
<p>In an extract from another textbook, the former Chief Protector of Aborigines AO Neville justifies Australia’s racist policies towards its Indigenous people:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>… there are scores of children in the bush camps who should be taken away from whoever is looking after them and placed in a settlement…If we are going to fit and train such children for the future they cannot be left as they are…I want to give these children a chance…Unless those children are removed, social conditions in those places will go from bad to worse…I want to teach them right from wrong. How are the children to fight against these conditions? The conditions in the absence of teaching are going to become infinitely worse than they are now.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Neville claims to be motivated by what is good for the victims and does not seem to see the harm in separating children and their families. But the textbook does not explore this clash between his somewhat paternalistic attitude and the dangerous reality of his policies. It doesn’t explore whether it’s possible that Neville genuinely believed his policies were fair and right.</p>
<p>Instead, students are asked to write a few paragraphs about whether “you think the Australians committed genocide or not”. The teacher guide makes the preferred answer clear:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>A comparison of the text in this unit with the listed actions will show that white Australians indeed committed all those actions that together constitute genocide of a people.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This rather glib model answer invites learners to make simple judgements about Neville and people like him and perpetuates the notion that some people are inherently evil while others are categorically helpless and have no power to make choices.</p>
<h2>The one that got it right</h2>
<p>One of the six books managed to <a href="https://books.google.co.za/books?id=_UA27TyBO0kC&pg=PA242&lpg=PA242&dq=New+Africa+history+grade+11+Frick+Janari+Proctor&source=bl&ots=02FIZ84wHZ&sig=I5gnceDMsIF2CTCOIuwnhL1-2b0&hl=en&sa=X&ei=fBiMVZ4Y68HsBsbWg_AI&ved=0CCwQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=New%20Africa%20history%20grade%2011%20Frick%20Janari%20Proctor&f=false">engage thoroughly</a> with different perspectives and even perspectives within perspectives. </p>
<p>It used primary sources in a way that would encourage students to think with empathy about the situations being examined. In addition, this book, more than any other, relied almost exclusively on primary sources which brought a range of voices and perspectives to the fore.</p>
<p>Crucially, it avoided drawing simplified comparisons between divergent histories. Instead, it related historical actors’ choices to those of learners’. For example, it showed how young people – with the kind of aspirations, hopes and dreams common to all those of a similar age – responded to the choices available to them in a certain place at a particular time. Even if these choices were “bad” (like supporting the Nazi party and its genocide), it showed how these young people thought and felt.</p>
<p>The other books used the kind of prescriptive moralising shown in the AO Neville example. They labelled white colonialists generally in very negative terms while not really getting into their heads at all. These texts would not help learners to understand different perspectives – they just reinforced stereotypical and presumptuous thinking. </p>
<p>They also focused too much on race as a category, which led to a simplification of the roles of victim and perpetrator and cast them into a template that leads to stereotypical thinking.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/43663/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Katalin Morgan received funding from the National Research Foundation (NRF) for conducting this research.</span></em></p>Are history textbooks constructing the past in a way that allows learners to develop empathy by walking in many different people’s shoes?Katalin Morgan, Lecturer , University of the WitwatersrandLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/381392015-03-02T06:22:19Z2015-03-02T06:22:19ZThere is no dastardly EU plot to hijack the history curriculum<p>Some of Britain’s most <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/11432847/Millions-of-children-being-taught-distorted-view-of-European-history-to-push-further-EU-integration.html">eminent historians</a>, worried about the growth and future direction of the EU, have spoken out against what they believe is an attempt to subject millions of British school children to <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/11435270/The-EU-is-in-thrall-to-a-historical-myth-of-European-unity.htm">skewed history lessons</a> designed to lead them into unthinking support for the creation of a single, pan-Europe state. </p>
<p>The spokesman for the Historians for Britain group, Cambridge historian David Abulafia, argues that the EU is systematically promoting a determinist view of European history in which European unity is presented as the inevitable outcome of the historical process itself. </p>
<p>This insidious message, he claims, is being planted in the minds of the continent’s youth through biased and suspect history textbooks. No doubt it had UKIP leader Nigel Farage spluttering over his morning pint. But I’d argue that these historians are skewing the facts themselves. </p>
<h2>British history at the centre</h2>
<p>Anyone who has had contact with history teaching in this country will find the claim of a dastardly EU plot to hijack it surprising to say the least. Few countries can beat the British for putting their own history at the heart of the school curriculum. British history was a <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-curriculum-in-england-history-programmes-of-study">major thrust</a> of former education secretary Michael Gove’s revision of the national curriculum. </p>
<p>Whether it is the conditions of the industrial revolution or the horrors of the trenches, British children are overwhelmingly taught only about the experience of their own country. The only major exceptions to the rule are Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Russia, neither of them exactly designed to whet the appetite for greater involvement with the continent. As the European Association of History Teachers, <a href="http://www.euroclio.eu/new/index.php">Euroclio</a>, has often found, national history is still the dominant feature of school curricula across the continent.</p>
<p>Of course, there are those who promote integration, but they wield relatively little influence over European school curricula and have met with resistance. Napoleonic War re-enactors were <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/meeting-their-waterloo-again-1590689.html">outraged a few years back</a> when their Battle of Waterloo reconstruction culminated in the flying of the European flag instead of the Union Jack. </p>
<p>In 1992, a <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/histoire-de-leurope/oclc/37609068">European history textbook</a> was put together by a team of academics drawn from across the continent, each writing one chapter. The book never caught on (it was never translated into English, for one thing), but the idea is still <a href="http://www.dw.de/call-for-european-history-book-as-education-ministers-meet/a-2370988">aired from time to time</a>, usually by politicians with no experience of actually teaching in a classroom.</p>
<p>Abulafia is clearly right that the question of our relationship with Europe needs to be seen in the context of our history, but the argument that our children are somehow being brainwashed into a Euro-outlook by their history teachers simply won’t wash. Even if it did, the <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-european-fear-of-islam-from-paris-to-dresden-36242">rapid growth of Euroscepticism</a> even in the EU’s French and German heartlands suggests a strangely ineffective plot. In fact, the claim misrepresents the very valuable work that has indeed gone on at a European level to turn history teaching from the fuel of conflict into a basis for peace.</p>
<h2>Absolute objectivity impossible</h2>
<p>All history teaching works to an agenda, whether the patriotic jingoism of the days of Empire or today’s liberal consensus. Absolute objectivity is difficult for academic historians and it is even harder with a young audience, who need their attention grabbed and held on a sunny Friday afternoon. </p>
<p>But all too often this can feed negative perceptions of other people. Since the 1950s, the Council of Europe <a href="http://www.coe.int/t/dg4/education/historyteaching/default_en.asp">has been promoting</a> the use of history teaching to combat bias, prejudice and national stereotypes. The Council’s recent project on <a href="http://www.coe.int/t/dg4/education/historyteaching/Projects%5CImage%5CImageIntro_en.asp">The Image of the Other</a> looked at this question through a series of bilateral studies: after all, Germans can legitimately grouse if the only image British children receive of them is as Nazis. </p>
<p>The best way round such stereotyping is not to promote European integration but to encourage teachers and children to see history from more than one national perspective.</p>
<p>Some years ago, the Council of Europe funded an exercise I organised which involved bringing students from different countries together to <a href="http://www.coe.int/t/dg4/education/historyteaching/Source/Notions/Simulation/RerunningPast1997_en.pdf">recreate the 1919 Paris Peace Conference</a>. It would have been easy to go for a fuzzy “Euro” approach, but we didn’t. We brought the differences of the past into the open and my students found that, beneath the fashions and music they all had in common, deep national divisions still remained. </p>
<p>I am now working with children at Sawston Village College on a <a href="http://ww1journeys.org/">World War I project</a> which is tracing three soldiers’ stories with local links. To their surprise, one was a German. By looking at familiar war experiences from his point of view their understanding of the whole war was transformed. And not an EU flag in sight.</p>
<p>Historians for Britain are right to resist attempts to hijack the subject for the purposes of integration, or for any political purpose. It does not follow, however, that every European initiative is necessarily aiming at further integration, still less that it should be denounced in favour of an exclusively British focus.</p>
<hr>
<p>Next read: <a href="https://theconversation.com/school-history-exams-shouldnt-just-be-a-test-of-britishness-25799">School history exams shouldn’t just be a test of Britishness</a></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/38139/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sean Lang is affiliated with the Better History Forum, an independent group of teachers and academics which promotes debate about change in the school history curriculum.</span></em></p>Claims by a group of eminent British historians that Eurohistory is taking over the school curriculum are unfounded.Sean Lang, Senior Lecturer in History, Anglia Ruskin UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/372462015-02-09T05:46:45Z2015-02-09T05:46:45ZThoughts about Magna Carta, inspired by Horrible Histories<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/71322/original/image-20150206-28615-58cgo1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">You don't wanna mess with crooked King John.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">BBC/Lions TV</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The British Library has just staged an <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/feb/02/british-library-magna-carta-copies-800">exclusive one-day exhibition</a>. The four earliest surviving copies of the original Magna Carta were brought together for an audience of 1,215 people, selected by public ballot. The BBC, meanwhile, have brought the theme of King John and Magna Carta to a different, wider, and predominantly younger audience. The Horrible Histories team is back, in style.</p>
<p>Fans of the series know what to expect here, with all the boxes ticked when it comes to burping, farting, vomiting, gags (good, bad, and ugly) and plenty of violence to boot.</p>
<p>A lot is certainly packed in. We hear about John’s lousy reputation before he became king. His father, Henry II is said to have jokingly nicknamed him Lackland at a time when there was seemingly no inheritance for his youngest son, and this prompts quite a laugh. </p>
<p>There’s a reference to Gerald of Wales’s tale that the teenage John pulled the beards of the Irish chieftains when sent to Ireland in 1185. Whether or not this actually happened, the expedition was generally deemed a disaster. And too good a story to pass up.</p>
<p>We learn of John’s coronation in 1199, before digressing to earlier events in the Holy Land. Here, we meet a caricature of Saladin and the Battle of Hattin, which paved the way for the fall of Christian-held Jerusalem in 1187, and prompted men like Richard the Lionheart to go on crusade.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/71335/original/image-20150206-28612-1hmd5z2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/71335/original/image-20150206-28612-1hmd5z2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=514&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/71335/original/image-20150206-28612-1hmd5z2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=514&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/71335/original/image-20150206-28612-1hmd5z2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=514&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/71335/original/image-20150206-28612-1hmd5z2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=645&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/71335/original/image-20150206-28612-1hmd5z2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=645&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/71335/original/image-20150206-28612-1hmd5z2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=645&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Ben Miller as King John.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">BBC/Lion TV</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Luxury and kingship</h2>
<p>John’s taxation of his subjects is to the fore. We are told:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>He lived a life of luxury,<br>
That’s what his tax was for</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Well, not really. Most of John’s revenue raising was intended to raise sums to pay for an army (primarily mercenaries) to retake the lands he had lost in France. But it’s true he didn’t get very far with the cash he gained.</p>
<p>Besides, medieval writers tended to understand that kings needed to be seen to be rich. John’s son and successor, Henry III, was even criticised, by the 13th century monk and chronicler Matthew Paris, for attempted austerity:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The lord king, shamelessly departing from his father’s [John’s] footsteps, ordered the expenses of his court and the customary pleasures of hospitality to be cut back, even so as to incur the reproach of inexcusable avarice.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>That said, Horrible Histories shows an eye for finer detail. John did travel his kingdom extensively, changing location, on average, once every three days across a reign of over 17 years. And the royal household did include people specifically responsible for the king’s bed, bath and toilet.</p>
<h2>Magna Carta, 1215</h2>
<p>And then the famous events at Runnymede in 1215 come to the fore. The barons declare that they have “written a list of grievances … for the Magna Carta” because they’re “really ticked off, big time”. Here, we might note that the document was not initially thought of as “Magna Carta”. The barons themselves drew up a list known as “the articles of the barons”. The name Magna Carta was not applied until 1217, to distinguish what remained of the charter of liberties agreed at Runnymede from a separate document relating to the Royal Forests.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/F_5My8XH-n0?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>Debate about the content of what became Magna Carta takes the form of a rap battle. Why not? Initially, they avoid the time-honoured misconception that King John “signed” Magna Carta in the way we today would sign a letter, document, or cheque. The barons demand the king to “hit it with your seal and give us our rights”.</p>
<p>The effect, however, is somewhat spoilt by a baron waving a quill pen as if to sign the document spread on the table. Later, in John’s interview with Death, there are repeated references to Magna Carta as a “piece of paper” signed by the king. The comic effect of John comparing it to toilet-roll fits the style of the programme. Yet this was a document drawn up on parchment and authenticated by the addition of the king’s seal, not by him signing his name.</p>
<p>Although humour is at the fore, there is nonetheless emphasis on the overall significance of Magna Carta: “For the first time in history, the king had to follow the law.” The balance of fundamental rights a king should guarantee, alongside clauses linked to matters of immediate grievance, is shown in the line:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>There’s vital stuff here that you’ve got to give us.<br>
There’s also some stuff about fishing in the rivers.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The last part here is an allusion to the removal of fish-weirs (to quote Magna Carta itself) “from the Thames and the Medway and throughout all England, except on the sea-coast”.</p>
<h2>A birthday</h2>
<p>But above all the greatest triumph of the programme lies in conveying the history of Magna Carta since John’s reign in a whistle-stop tour of 800 years of history, set to a reworking of The Proclaimers’ <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbNlMtqrYS0">I’m Gonna Be (500 miles)</a>. As the team tell us:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Magna Carta<br>
It’s a parta<br>
What you’re taught at school</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Music – a much under-rated means of learning – here sums up, in about three minutes, what might take hours in the schoolroom, and volumes of academic books. Horrible Histories successfully conveys the significance of their theme:</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/XTWQzF1027I?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<blockquote>
<p>And I would say 800 years,<br>
A birthday worth 800 cheers<br>
Since 1215 Magna Carta’s been<br>
The foundation of our democracy … </p>
<p>And I would hope 800 years<br>
Of freedom never disappears<br>
All hale this simple ancient law<br>
May it survive 800 more!</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Cheers to that.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/37246/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Paul Webster has in the past received funding from the AHRC.</span></em></p>The British Library has just staged an exclusive one-day exhibition. The four earliest surviving copies of the original Magna Carta were brought together for an audience of 1,215 people, selected by public…Paul Webster, Teaching Associate in History, Cardiff UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/315992015-01-26T10:56:45Z2015-01-26T10:56:45ZWhat countries teach children about the Holocaust varies hugely<p>As the world pauses to remember the Holocaust, it is important to at what children around the world are learning about the horrific events of 70 years ago and their aftermath. </p>
<p>A recent <a href="http://www.gei.de/en/research/europe-narratives-images-spaces/international-status-of-education-on-the-holocaust-a-global-mapping-of-textbooks-and-curricula.html">research project</a> between the Georg Eckert Institute and UNESCO attempted to map the status of the Holocaust in secondary school-level history and social studies curricula and textbooks around the world. The <a href="http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0022/002287/228776e.pdf">resulting report</a> can help us to better understand the ways in which information and learning about the past is treated in societies as geographically and historically remote as Brazil, China, Egypt, India, Namibia, Spain and the United States. </p>
<h2>Big disparities in curricula</h2>
<p>The research involved thorough and carefully co-ordinated research which scrutinised 272 currently valid curricula from 139 countries and territories in more than ten different languages, and 89 textbooks published in 26 countries since 2000. Great care was taken to ensure that conceptualisations and narratives of the Holocaust were documented and compared adequately in spite of the variety of languages into which its history has been translated. </p>
<p>The curricula analysis revealed considerable disparities around the world, which have been visualised in various maps. Even the very names of the event differ, ranging from “Shoah”, “Holocaust”, “genocide”, “massacre”, or “extermination” to the “concentration camp” or “final solution”. </p>
<p>In total, 57 curricula clearly stipulate the Holocaust with a direct reference to words such as “Holocaust” or “Shoah”, while 28 do not. The countries which make no reference to the Holocaust in their curricula – shaded in yellow on the maps – include Egypt, Palestine, New Zealand, Iraq and Thailand. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/69909/original/image-20150123-24503-11vqkra.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/69909/original/image-20150123-24503-11vqkra.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/69909/original/image-20150123-24503-11vqkra.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=472&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/69909/original/image-20150123-24503-11vqkra.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=472&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/69909/original/image-20150123-24503-11vqkra.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=472&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/69909/original/image-20150123-24503-11vqkra.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=593&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/69909/original/image-20150123-24503-11vqkra.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=593&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/69909/original/image-20150123-24503-11vqkra.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=593&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The status of the Holocaust on the curricula in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0022/002287/228776e.pdf">UNESCO/Georg Eckert Institute</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The curricula of eight countries address the Holocaust only partially – where it is mentioned to achieve a learning aim that is not specifically related to the Holocaust. In Mexico, for example, the Holocaust is mentioned as one among other aspects of human rights education. A further 46 countries, such as Algeria and Japan, provide only the context in which the Holocaust may be taught and thus refer only to World War II or to National Socialism. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/69908/original/image-20150123-24552-rwh1en.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/69908/original/image-20150123-24552-rwh1en.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=574&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/69908/original/image-20150123-24552-rwh1en.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=574&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/69908/original/image-20150123-24552-rwh1en.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=574&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/69908/original/image-20150123-24552-rwh1en.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=722&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/69908/original/image-20150123-24552-rwh1en.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=722&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/69908/original/image-20150123-24552-rwh1en.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=722&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0022/002287/228776e.pdf">UNESCO/Georg Eckert Institute</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The findings of our textbook study reveal that representations of the Holocaust adhered to broadly shared patterns. For example, most textbooks focus on the years of intense killing from 1942 to 1944 or the years of World War II. They name the geographical spaces in which the Holocaust took place in general terms as “Europe” or “Germany”, while neglecting the general government, occupied territories, or satellite and collaborating states.</p>
<p>Images in these books are more likely to depict the perpetrators than victims or bystanders – and the conspicuousness of Adolf Hitler suggests that he was largely responsible for the event. At the same time, there are radical differences in the ways in which the Holocaust is narrated and the didactic methods applied to it when teaching, especially in explanations of its causes and effects.</p>
<h2>Comparisons with local examples</h2>
<p>Most strikingly, Chinese textbooks borrow the language and imagery of the Holocaust and apply them to the <a href="http://www.history.com/topics/nanjing-massacre">Nanjing massacres</a> of 1937 by the Japanese army. Japanese textbooks likewise adopt the language of the Holocaust in presentations of the devastation of cities by atomic bombs at the end of World War II. </p>
<p>Historians thus “tragedise” their own pasts by conspicuously re-contextualising vocabulary customarily used to describe the Holocaust, including “terrible massacres”, “killings”, “mass murders”, “atrocities” and “extermination”. These have been adopted, for example, in Rwandan textbooks to describe the genocide of 1994. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/69910/original/image-20150123-24541-13szzhd.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/69910/original/image-20150123-24541-13szzhd.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/69910/original/image-20150123-24541-13szzhd.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=489&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/69910/original/image-20150123-24541-13szzhd.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=489&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/69910/original/image-20150123-24541-13szzhd.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=489&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/69910/original/image-20150123-24541-13szzhd.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=615&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/69910/original/image-20150123-24541-13szzhd.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=615&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/69910/original/image-20150123-24541-13szzhd.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=615&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The status of the Holocaust on the curricula in Africa.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0022/002287/228776e.pdf">UNESCO/Georg Eckert Institute</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The Holocaust is also domesticated, or conceptualised in new idiosyncratic or local ways. For example, Chinese textbooks do not employ the terms “Holocaust” or “Shoah”, but rather “genocide” (datusha) and “kinds of crimes” (zhongzhong zuixing). The Chinese textbooks render the event understandable for local readers in a language which is familiar to them, yet which does not convey the historical specificity traditionally ascribed to the Holocaust by western scholars and teachers. </p>
<p>There is no international standard for talking about the Holocaust. Teaching about it is proof of the divergence of overlapping narratives, dominated by local circumstances in which children learn about it. That said, similarities occur between specific textbooks or between regions, nations and continents without adhering to a singular pattern.</p>
<h2>More systematic approach</h2>
<p>The recommendations, published at the end of our report, acknowledge these local idiosyncrasies while calling for greater historical accuracy and more systematic comparisons of genocides. As the maps show, few countries already include the Holocaust in their history teaching while others refer only indirectly to the event or to its historical context.</p>
<p>In Africa, further inclusion of the Holocaust in curricula would constitute a step towards greater awareness of European history. Likewise, comparisons between genocides both here and there would raise awareness of African history in Europe. Yet it remains to be seen whether lessons of the past will, in practice, entrench humanitarian and human values around the world.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/31599/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The Holocaust curricula mapping project was funded by UNESCO and the Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research, where Eckhardt Fuchs is currently deputy director. He is also President of the International Standing Conference on the History of Education. </span></em></p>As the world pauses to remember the Holocaust, it is important to at what children around the world are learning about the horrific events of 70 years ago and their aftermath. A recent research project…Eckhardt Fuchs, Deputy director of the Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research and Chair for History of Education and Comparative Education, Technical University BraunschweigLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/257992014-04-29T05:13:10Z2014-04-29T05:13:10ZSchool history exams shouldn’t just be a test of Britishness<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/47150/original/6dfbpfh9-1398681651.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">There's more to history than kings and queens. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/wallyg/298031269/sizes/l">wallg</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">CC BY-NC-ND</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The government has recently <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/302102/A_level_history_subject_content.pdf">announced changes</a> to the content of GCSE and A level history exams in England. As in previous reforms to the history curriculum, the documents set out the proportion of British history which children must learn in their history course. <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/gcse-subject-content">At GCSE</a> level, exams will now have to have a 40% focus on British history, up from 25%, but at <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/gce-as-and-a-level-for-history">A level</a>, the proportion of British content has been reduced from 25% to 20%. </p>
<p>When I was an A level examiner in the 1980s and early 1990s, the exam consisted of two equally weighted papers, one British, one European, so British history accounted for 50% of the subject content which was studied. </p>
<p>Unlike the draft version of the national curriculum for history unveiled by the department of education in February 2013 and <a href="http://www.consider-ed.org.uk/historical-associations-response-to-the-draft-national-curriculum">strongly criticised by over 90% of history teachers</a> in a Historical Association survey, the new proposals read as if they have been constructed by people with a sound grasp of the principles involved in history education. I suspect there is very little in the aims and objectives section that practising history teachers would find objectionable or inappropriate. </p>
<p>There are many questions to ask about the purpose and design of history exams, but I’m going to focus here on two: to what extent should history examinations be based around the story of the nation’s past? And should history teaching attempt to present a positive picture of the nation’s past, rather than a dispassionately objective and critical one? </p>
<h2>The purposes of school history</h2>
<p><a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/8043872/Conservative-Part-Conference-schoolchildren-ignorant-of-the-past-says-Gove.html">Politicians</a> and <a href="http://www.politeia.co.uk/sites/default/files/files/Final%20Appendix%20to%20Lessons%20from%20History.pdf">some think tanks</a> have argued that the main purpose of school history should be to provide young people with an understanding of the main political and constitutional developments in the nation’s past that have led us to where we are today. </p>
<p>Some historians have argued this gives young people a reductionist and archaic picture of the discipline of history. David Cannadine <a href="http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/news/this-sceptical-isle/96008.article">points out</a> that, since World War II, “historians of ideas, of culture, of capitalism, of technology, of population, of race, of sex, of gender and of religion were rarely concerned with specific national boundaries at all”. </p>
<p>In <a href="http://www.schoolshistoryproject.org.uk/ResourceBase/downloads/MandlerKeynote2013.pdf">his critique</a> of an early draft of the new history curriculum, historian Peter Mandler noted: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>There is nothing about ‘Britain transformed’ by the rise of the mass media (from radio and cinema to television and the internet), or by secularisation, or by women’s entry into the labour market, or by youth sub-cultures, or by consumerism, or by globalisation, or by the ebb and flow of equality and inequality, or by family limitation, or by Americanisation, or by social mobility, or by environmental change or ideas of history and heritage.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Mandler also pointed to the danger of only teaching British or non-European history when people from those countries become part of the empire or emigrate to Britain. </p>
<p>It should be borne in mind that the <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-curriculum-in-england-history-programmes-of-study">new national curriculum</a> for history, like its predecessor, focuses mainly on British history at Key Stage 3 (the two or three years before GCSEs), so pupils will already have studied British history from 1066 onwards. </p>
<p>Under the new examination arrangements, (as in the national curriculum for history), the subject will still be presented primarily in geographical terms: British/European/other. And although there is still a paragraph about exploring history from a range of perspectives, it is likely that political history will once again prevail for the most part. </p>
<p>This is in spite of the fact that history is about the human past, not just the national one. Cultural and supranational issues such as climate change, food supply, employment, population, globalisation, migration, power and inequality are arguably more relevant to young people’s lives than kings and queens. </p>
<p>Yet the secretary of state for education Michael Gove <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1255899/Children-learn-poetry-monarchs-England-heart-Tory-plans.html">has argued</a> that what most people want is “a traditional education, with children sitting in rows, learning the kings and queens of England”.</p>
<h2>Back to the past</h2>
<p>This brings us to the second question about the way a nation’s past should be presented in schools, and in examinations. Before the 1970s, history in English schools was taught in the main as a positive and celebratory “progress narrative”, sometimes termed “Whig History”. </p>
<p>From the 1970s, there was a move towards a more objective, critical and questioning enquiry into the nation’s past. More emphasis was put on the virtues of pupils developing an understanding of the discipline of history, with its rules and conventions for ascertaining the validity of claims made about the past. </p>
<p>There is no question that Gove is pushing for a return to a positive and celebratory rendering of “our island story” in English schools, the sort of school history which prevailed in Victorian times and up to the 1970s. He has <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/8043872/Conservative-Part-Conference-schoolchildren-ignorant-of-the-past-says-Gove.html">argued</a>: “The current approach to school history denies children the opportunity to hear our island story … this trashing of our past has to stop.” </p>
<p>It is argued by Gove and others (including much of the tabloid press), that the return to this heroic rendering of “our island story” will aid social cohesion. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/47153/original/vbmc66vt-1398684161.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/47153/original/vbmc66vt-1398684161.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/47153/original/vbmc66vt-1398684161.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=449&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/47153/original/vbmc66vt-1398684161.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=449&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/47153/original/vbmc66vt-1398684161.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=449&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/47153/original/vbmc66vt-1398684161.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=564&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/47153/original/vbmc66vt-1398684161.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=564&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/47153/original/vbmc66vt-1398684161.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=564&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Always at the centre of history?</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/boston_public_library/4404528478/in/photolist-7HdmSb-7GaACn-cnxXKW-7GaADV-6viywK-55nonT-4p1jLh-ciPfBj-cUXBMQ-6kGg8o-KKeAg-4gzTG8-daAq9X-KeoVu-7rTNDH-55oPrU-55oSeb-55jCPk-7rTNK2-7rTPbB-7ZmsGq-dFtBgB-55rzkm-4gATc6-7HTkqE-7HtgW3-crJMkQ-7GaAGB-7HtgNJ-cZCKDf-KewHD-crJMg1-d1TDYq-d1TDVs-6kCbCV-cZCJDS-96C9qz-cZCLdh-cZCK9s-ekmfd-2C6FbV-8ZqMLG-Kh1Vn-d1TE81-d1TE27-d1TE5m-dFiiQQ-dFijzj-dFiiTJ-dFiea1">Boston Public Library</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>I <a href="http://www.researchgate.net/publication/229545644_IDENTITY_AND_SCHOOL_HISTORY_THE_PERSPECTIVE_OF_YOUNG_PEOPLE_FROM_THE_NETHERLANDS_AND_ENGLAND">have argued elsewhere</a> that this is an unexamined assumption. The easy availability of other sources of information about Britain’s past, on the internet, on television, in newspapers and in popular history magazines makes it difficult to sustain this idealised past. Pupils will learn from other sources that all countries have their skeletons in the cupboard.</p>
<h2>Good history from bad</h2>
<p>It is important that history exams should assess pupils’ understanding of the substantive past. But they should also develop understanding of the nature and status of historical knowledge. This is part of what makes history useful to young people and to a healthy democracy. </p>
<p>The late historian <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/sep/22/history.politicalbooks">Eric Hobsbawn pointed out</a>, “History is being invented in vast quantities … the world is today full of people inventing histories and lying about history.” Given the variability in the quality and integrity of history that is now publicly available, and the sophistication with which information about the past is manipulated and used, it is more important than ever that children should be educated to discern good history from bad. </p>
<p>The strength of the government’s new proposals is that there is a clear acknowledgement of the importance of the development of critical and reflective learners, capable of handling information intelligently, and awareness that history teaching “<a href="http://www.uea.ac.uk/%7Em242/historypgce/purposes/purpose_critical_judgement.htm">has to take place</a> in a spirit which takes seriously the need to pursue truth on the basis of evidence”. </p>
<p>The danger is that the examinations will continue to place too much emphasis on the political and constitutional strands of “our island story” with a bit of European and world history thrown in. </p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/25799/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Terry Haydn does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The government has recently announced changes to the content of GCSE and A level history exams in England. As in previous reforms to the history curriculum, the documents set out the proportion of British…Terry Haydn, Professor of Education, School of Education & Lifelong Learning, University of East AngliaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/241422014-04-08T14:12:14Z2014-04-08T14:12:14ZGerman schools are building bridges across Europe as they remember World War I<p>German approaches to the history lessons of World War I are characterised by a sense of distance and an anti-war attitude. But probably the most striking feature of the way Germany teaches its children about World War I in this centenary year is the sideways connection being made across Europe. </p>
<p>Being a German working on British culture in the UK has made the differing war memories of each country quite tangible for me. I tend to insist on a connection between past and present, but one that clearly separates the two. Britain’s unbroken identification with a country at war feels strange, as does the casual use of words such as “enemy” or “home front”. </p>
<p>In Germany, the Holocaust and World War II continue to dominate cultural memory, including the teaching of history. Battlefield tourism is rarely on the agenda, but German pupils travel to concentration camps as a matter of course. </p>
<p>Yet the traumatic legacy of the Third Reich is not the only concern. When Sylvia Löhrmann, president of the standing conference of ministers of education and cultural affairs, declared 2014 an important <a href="http://www.kmk.org/presse-und-aktuelles/meldung/ministerin-sylvia-loehrmann-praesidentin-der-kultusministerkonferenz-2014.html">year of remembrance</a> for German schools, she placed the centenary of World War I alongside the 75th anniversary of World War II and the fall of the Berlin Wall 25 years ago.</p>
<h2>Absence of material</h2>
<p>Such spread of attention might be the reason why commentators felt Germany had a slow start into the 1914 centenary. But even the most dedicated followers of the centenary face a challenge. They cannot tap into a popular cultural archive. </p>
<p>Wartime and inter-war German literature and films are less known than their anglophone counterparts. Nazi attempts to rewrite the history of World War I, such as in the 1938 feature film <a href="http://www.filmportal.de/en/node/18165"><em>Pour le Mérite</em></a>, are undesirable propaganda. Later productions on World War I are so few and far between that they hardly matter at all.</p>
<p>This accounts for a clear boundary between literary accounts and historical writing in Germany. It is different from Britain, where writers and historians often present World War I side by side. A recent event on “<a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-26546416">how schools should best prepare</a>” for the centenary, organised by the public school Wellington College, serves as an example of this British approach. </p>
<p>In the German context, the historical archive also comes under scrutiny. The exploration of past lives and views is usually one of comparison and critical reflection on one’s own situation and values. This strategy is part and parcel of the citizenship focus of German history teaching. It is a way for learners to interact with the questions of guilt that could be raised by the material they study.</p>
<h2>Euro-centric place in history</h2>
<p>The focus on comparison and relations with neighbours shows how necessary it is to react to a negative historical image. More constructively, it confirms the reinvention of Germany as a European player and facilitator. Remembering war is firmly rooted in this understanding. </p>
<p>The <a href="http://www.volksbund.de/en/volksbund.html">Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge</a>, the charity looking after German war graves, is dedicated to a European culture of remembrance and runs an international educational programme. The Rhineland calls its World War I project on this contested region <a href="http://www.rheinland1914.lvr.de/media/1914/dokumente/broschueren_usw/Broschuere_1914_englisch.pdf">1914 - In the Middle of Europe</a>. </p>
<p>The centenary has triggered school exchanges between Germany and Bosnia-Herzegovina. The teacher conference <a href="http://www.nglv.de/index.php?pid=2&id=1626">1914-1918: War and Peace</a>, held in Hannover in February 2014, showcases French-German conversations and advocates a transnational teaching of history. The State Library of Berlin coordinates the <a href="http://pro.europeana.eu/web/europeana-collections-1914-1918">Europeana Collections 1914-1918</a>, stressing the importance of World War I for a common European identity. </p>
<p>An event promising an interactive exposure to history is being organised in May 2014 by the <a href="http://www.bpb.de/die-bpb/138852/the-federal-agency-for-civic-education">Federal Agency for Civic Education</a>. Advertised in German and English, <a href="http://www.bpb.de/veranstaltungen/format/festival/175125/europe-1414">Look back, think forward: Be a part of Europe 14|14!</a> promotes Europe as a joint peace project. It also markets Berlin as a youth destination and site of (popular) history, turning Germany’s awkward historical position into an advantage – all under the European banner, of course. </p>
<p>Is Germany’s European take on the centenary useful and inclusive? Or is it self-serving and patronising, simply a feature of what Wolfgang Schivelbusch described as a <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/nov/29/history.highereducation1">culture of defeat</a>? I would argue that any strategy comes at a price, and not all outcomes of the centenary years can be foreseen.</p>
<h2>Both approaches have value</h2>
<p>The UK’s emotional recovery of the war years through re-enactment, song and even trench-building is for me more nostalgically marked than for those who engage in it. It is also the basis for considerable cultural productivity at a local level. I have seen how World War I heritage funding has empowered British schools and community groups, local historians and creative practitioners. </p>
<p>Local and family history, at least publicly displayed, has had limited appeal in Germany due to the dread of what one might find. But, as the large turn out at Berlin’s Europeana collection days has shown, many items have survived in German households. They are now shared in a liberating, pan-European “show and tell”, initially inspired by the Oxford-led <a href="http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/gwa/">Great War Archive</a>.</p>
<p>The German model of remembrance also has potential. It could expand knowledge about German colonialism and the long history of German-Turkish relations. Whether the Europe 14|14 event will be followed by Turkey 15|15, with an eye on the Dardanelles and the Armenian genocide, remains to be seen. </p>
<p>Much depends on how Turkey constructs its World War I memory. Nevertheless, German and German-Turkish teachers, pupils and citizens might be interested in discovering their World War I heritage together on a local level.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/24142/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Claudia Sternberg received funding from the German Research Council (DFG) for research on the representation of World War I in British film and television. She has supported WWI centenary projects, co-funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Heritage Lottery Fund. She is involved in Legacies of War at University of Leeds, an interdisciplinary project which organises and facilitates WWI research and engagement activities.</span></em></p>German approaches to the history lessons of World War I are characterised by a sense of distance and an anti-war attitude. But probably the most striking feature of the way Germany teaches its children…Claudia Sternberg, Senior Lecturer, School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies, University of LeedsLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.