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  • 2007-04-15 (xsd:date)
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  • Is There a Holocaust Teaching Ban in the UK? (en)
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  • This piece about UK schools reportedly dropping the subject of the Holocaust from history classes began circulating via e-mail in mid-April 2007: Its central claim, that schools in Britain no longer teach about the Holocaust for fear of offending Muslim students, isn't on the money: Even news articles that bore headlines such as Teachers drop the Holocaust to avoid offending Muslims only cited a single example of one history department in a northern UK school that did that (and for reasons other than avoiding offending Muslims). In all the rest of the country's schools, information about the Holocaust was still being imparted to students. Those news articles were a response to the March 2007 release of the Historical Association's report titled Teaching Emotive and Controversial History 3-19 (an overview of its objectives can be found here and the full report here), a study funded by the UK's Department for Education and Skills to examine how educators in Britain were teaching sensitive and/or controversial aspects of history and to highlight what approaches had worked among those that had been tried. One history department looked at by the fact-finders was found to have cut information about the Holocaust from its lessons due to worries that Muslim pupils might express anti-Semitic reactions. Said the report: For example, a history department in a northern city recently avoided selecting the Holocaust as a topic for GCSE coursework for fear of confronting anti-Semitic sentiment and Holocaust denial among some Muslim pupils. From this single example of one UK school was spun the claim that every school in that country had stopped teaching about the Holocaust for fear of offending Muslim students. In fact, the education department's plan was the opposite: to ensure that the Holocaust was taught everywhere. A spokesman for the Department of Education and Skills (DES) maintained that The Ajegbo report on citizenship [a different report authored by Sir Keith Ajegbo and released in January 2007] said key British historical events must be taught and that while the national curriculum is a broad framework and there is scope for schools to make their own decisions, teaching elements including the Holocaust and key British events will be compulsory. According to a DES spokesman, Teaching of the Holocaust is already compulsory in schools at Key Stage 3 (ages 11 to 14), and it will remain so in the new KS3 curriculum from September 2008. Schools in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland have different guidelines and curriculums; in those parts of the UK, according to the BBC, Holocaust teaching is not compulsory but schools may teach it if they wish, and this has not changed recently. The bottom line to all this fuss? Schools in the UK are indeed teaching about the Holocaust, something British journalists seemed to downplay in their rush to report that one department in one city was not. The e-mailed call to arms cited above was likely the result of a misreading of already badly-presented news articles. Several months after the original of this item first appeared, someone mistook (or deliberately confused) the abbreviation UK with the University of Kentucky and changed the central claim to be the University of Kentucky had removed The Holocaust from its school curriculum. The University of Kentucky issued a press release on 8 November 2007 to correct this misinformation: Versions of this item circulated in early 2008 included the following preface: (en)
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