The Georg Eckert Institute presents preliminary findings from its study examining the way in which the Holocaust is handled in schools worldwide

The Georg Eckert Institute presents preliminary findings from its study examining the way in which the Holocaust is handled in schools worldwide.

How do schools around the world handle the Holocaust as a subject? In what areas of the world does the Holocaust form part of classroom teaching? Answers to these questions are being sought by a project set up by the Georg Eckert Institute in Braunschweig in cooperation with UNESCO. Researchers began to assess curricula and textbooks from around the world in summer 2012. The preliminary findings will be presented today (27 January 2014) at a conference in Paris on the occasion of International Holocaust Remembrance Day. They show: the Holocaust is included on the curricula in most regions of the world, but that there are enormous variations in how this is subsequently conveyed through textbook material and lesson content.

At a UNESCO conference in Paris today marking International Holocaust Remembrance Day researchers from the Georg Eckert Institute will present initial findings from the study ‘International Status of Education on the Holocaust. A Global Mapping of Textbooks and Curricula’. The study has examined where and to what extent the Holocaust is established in official education guidelines. Are representations of the Holocaust nuanced, comprehensive and unbiased? In what contexts do they appear? And are there national and regional differences between them? In order to address these questions, school textbooks from twenty six representative countries will be qualitatively analysed and compared with one another.

The complete study will be published in spring 2014, however, the initial findings indicate the significance of the Holocaust in school education: in the majority of the 125 countries analysed, the Holocaust was included on the curriculum – although it was afforded very different importance depending on the region and political situation.

In Western countries it played a central role; in other countries it was frequently incorporated in the study of the Second World War or simply covered under human rights or other historical genocide, and not treated as a separate topic. The textbook narratives also demonstrated that there is no “cosmopolitan memory culture” with regards to the Holocaust, rather many different narratives: Albanian textbooks for example, refer to an “Age of Turmoil 1914-1945” and tend to focus on Albanian citizens who saved persecuted Jews. In contrast, in China and Rwanda, the European Holocaust appears only fleetingly as a measure of comparison in the presentation of regional genocides.

Recommendations for improvements in textbooks

The Georg Eckert Institute will provide educational policy makers with recommendations on which to base future curricula decisions, augmenting corresponding information from international organisations such as UNESCO, OSCE, the European Council, respective education ministries and the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). Among these recommendations are an increase of historical factuality and detail, and an increase in textbook texts being supplemented by additional sources, witness statements and the recognition of regional perspectives.

The project is being carried out jointly by UNESCO and the Georg Eckert Institute and the project duration is eighteen months.