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No Budget for the Holocaust

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  • No Budget for the Holocaust

    No Budget for the Holocaust

    Huffington Post
    02/06/2013

    By Tyler Moss

    My favorite class from high school is being cut.

    There are few courses that I remember fondly. Whether disillusioned
    geriatric teachers or bland curriculums revolving around standardized
    testing goals are to blame is up for debate. But I was devastated to
    see the following message posted on Facebook the other day by one of
    the best teachers I've ever had:

    Well I figured I better share here... after 7 years of teaching so
    many amazing students the Holocaust and Genocide Studies course, the
    class isn't going to be offered anymore. This is due primarily to
    budget cuts and tough choices made by administration (struggling with
    funding choices)... I thank you for an amazing 7 years sharing my
    passion with each of you. It's been an amazing honor!

    He then implored students to write him letters documenting their
    positive experiences in the course as a last-ditch effort to petition
    the district. I was devastated -- this was one of the only classes in
    high school that actually asked me to engage with it beyond the basic
    book report or Powerpoint presentation. Thus I wrote the following
    letter:

    To Whom It May Concern,

    I'm a professional magazine writer and editor living in Cincinnati,
    Ohio, and was enrolled in the class Holocaust and Genocide Studies in
    Fall 2006. It recently came to my attention that this course is to be
    cut from the school curriculum, which compelled me to write in and
    insist that you reconsider.

    It's no secret that public school funding doesn't exactly grow on
    trees, but if you're looking to cut classes, I beg that you leave
    Holocaust and Genocide Studies unscathed. Nearly 90 percent of the
    courses I took in high school were survey classes that could barely
    afford to spend more than a day on any major topic, which means that
    hardly any of the material was actually retained. In freshman history,
    we covered topics like the Industrial Revolution and the Great
    Depression in the span of two or three days. I remember being asked to
    practice rote memorization of acronyms of New Deal programs instated
    by the FDR Administration, and today I can barely recall a single one.

    But I can still tell you how many Jewish people were murdered by the
    Nazis during the Holocaust (6 million). I can still tell you the name
    of the man who coined the term genocide (Raphael Lemkin) and when
    (1944). I can even recall the name of the Cambodian dictator and
    leader of the Khmer Rouge who slaughtered his own people in the late
    70s (Pol Pot). But more than that, I remember discussing the nature of
    prejudice and the precarious social conditions that drive one group to
    slaughter another. I can still visualize the images of emaciated
    children behind chain-link fences, and the symbolic significance of a
    20-foot high stack of abandoned shoes. I recall engaging in passionate
    debates over the omnipotence paradox, and contemplating Hannah
    Arendt's phrase 'the banality of evil' from her book Eichmann in
    Jerusalem -- a text so rich and dense that I didn't revisit it again
    until studying journalism as a graduate student at Northwestern
    University.

    Why do I remember so much? Because Holocaust and Genocide Studies is a
    course that inherently intertwines education with empathy. You have no
    idea how much being emotionally invested in the material can actively
    engage a student in his or her own education. Not only were the
    photographs, readings, videos and lectures both powerful and
    provocative, but the class itself inspires students to be more than
    just a passive observer in history. By bearing witness to the horrors
    of the Holocaust, the Armenian Genocide, the Rwandan Genocide, the
    class becomes more than just a semester-long high school course or a
    letter on a report card. We're fulfilling a duty as first-world
    citizens living in a post-Holocaust era: to remember what happened. To
    Never Forget.

    I sure as hell haven't.

    Sincerely,

    Tyler Moss


    Unfortunately, it sounds like what the district really needs to keep
    this course afloat is cash, and these letters are only printed on
    computer paper, not blank checks. Regardless of the fate of Holocaust
    and Genocide Studies, let this episode stand as yet another tragedy in
    the tome of public education funding.

    Follow Tyler Moss on Twitter: www.twitter.com/@tjmoss11

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