The Southlake, Texas, Carroll Independent School District’s executive director of curriculum and instruction, Gina Peddy, directed teachers this month who have a Holocaust book in their classroom to provide students a book with an “opposing … perspective.” A staff member recorded Peddy instructing teachers to “remember the concepts of [House Bill 3979].”
The new bill instructs teachers who “discuss current events or widely debated and currently controversial issues” to do so “from diverse and contending perspectives without giving deference to any one perspective.”
“How do you oppose the Holocaust?” one teacher asked.
“Believe me,” Peddy responded. “That’s come up.”
The genocide of 6 million Jews during the Holocaust is not a “widely debated” or “currently controversial” topic. Those who oppose Holocaust history are known in popular parlance as Holocaust deniers or revisionists. Most are motivated by a deep antisemitism and believe the Holocaust never occurred, was vastly overestimated, or was exploited by Jews for material gain. Their attempts to revise or alter the historical record are an effort to perpetuate their prejudice.
Peddy’s remarks reflect the abysmal state of Holocaust education and the alarming rise of antisemitism in the United States. According to a 2020 survey from the Claims Conference, 1 in 10 young adults believes that Jews “caused the Holocaust,” while 23% believe that “the Holocaust is a myth, exaggerated, or were unsure.” Almost half of millennial respondents could not name a single one of the 40,000 Holocaust-era camps and ghettos, while nearly a third of the public and 41% of millennials believed the Holocaust resulted in the deaths of 2 million rather than 6 million Jews.
Instead of providing students with prejudicial texts that attempt to refute the Holocaust to further a campaign of hate, the Southlake district should follow a three-pronged approach to improving Holocaust education at its schools.
First, the district’s teachers should be encouraged to create robust libraries of literature from historians and Holocaust survivors so that students receive a rich education about the incontrovertible history of the Third Reich’s crimes. The district may be able to achieve funding for this effort by applying for a grant from the Texas Holocaust, Genocide, and Antisemitism Advisory Commission.
Second, administrators, students, and teachers should take a “virtual field trip” to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum or visit one of the four highly rated brick and mortar museums in Texas that educates visitors about Hitler’s persecution of Jews and “undesirable” populations. Ideally, such a trip would include a conversation with Holocaust survivors to balance the overarching history of the period with the personal experiences of those who witnessed Hitler’s killing machine at work.
Finally, armed with historical facts, teachers and administrators should work together to create lessons that address the unqualified horrors that took place in Nazi Germany during the Second World War. This education is imperative not only because it is a devastating part of the past, but because it is a constant reminder of how quickly humans can be convinced to hate and harm one another. The Holocaust teaches the vital importance of rejecting attempts at division to create a future that “never again” results in intolerance and genocide.
Beth Bailey (@BWBailey85) is a freelance writer from the Detroit area.
