Fallace, T. D. The Emergence of Holocaust Education in American Schools. NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
- Fallace, Thomas. "The Origins of Holocaust Education in American Public Schools." Holocaust and Genocide Studies, vol. 20, Issue 1, p. 80-102.
Fallace traces the rise of Holocaust education in American schools from the early efforts shortly after the ending of WWII – particularly at college level by Franklin Littell (p. 27) in the 1950s to a groundswell from ‘the bottom up’ inspired by local teachers in the 1970’s – to its full inclusion in American school curriculums today.
In writing about teaching the Holocaust and the aims of Secondary Education, Fallace does not follow most scholars’ views of the time that Holocaust education in public schools was a natural outgrowth of the general rise of Holocaust consciousness from the early 1970’s. He brings up his earlier research from 2006 and emphasizes the impact of the intense interest of teachers during the late 1960s and 1970s in focusing on ‘curriculum relevance’ and “student’s identity, morality, emotions, and values. Addressing the impact of this “affective revolution”, Fallace says that ‘short-lived though this ‘affective’ movement was due to the follow-on of the ‘back-to-basics and ‘standards movements’ it stimulated an educational environment “conducive to the introduction of the Holocaust as an area of study.”
Fallace discusses which curriculum approaches provide more room for engaging students in more ethical and moral dimensions of the Holocaust. He supports Kohlberg’s theory of moral development, (that drew on both Dewey’s and Piaget’s views). This theory ties moral development to the cognitive processes of the mind. Fallace writes:
Morality, according to Dewey and Kohlberg, is neither the internalization of established cultural values nor the unfolding of spontaneous impulses and emotions. Rather it is “justice, the reciprocity between the individual and others in his social environment.
In discussing Kohlberg’s views in an earlier research article on this subject, Fallace states:
By tying moral development to the cognitive processes of the mind, Kohlberg argued that his stages were universal. Thus morality, he suggested, was something that emerged from within through social interaction as opposed to something imposed from without through externally enforced discipline.
In also examining interdisciplinary approaches to teaching the Holocaust, Fallace discusses a variety of case studies – in particular that of Roselle Chartock from Massachusetts in 1973-1978. (p. 52)
The unit approached the topic from a psychological perspective aimed at probing the nature of humankind. It contained an abundance of visual and written sources that attempted to transmit the emotional trauma of the victims and the moral dilemmas of the perpetrators. The unit shifted back and forth between the historical facts of the Holocaust and investigations into the nature of man.
The importance of delving into the details provided by Fallace of major early school curriculum efforts to teach the Holocaust in American public schools makes us appreciate both the tensions between them and their compatibility with each other’s approaches. Fallace discusses the different teaching approaches. For example, some teachers teach the Holocaust from a universalistic, social studies approach. (An example would be the curriculum called “Facing History”). Other teachers choose to follow USHMM's guidelines: A ‘history-based alternative that emphasizes the Jewishness and uniqueness of the Holocaust’ published in 1995 as “Teaching about the Holocaust: A Resource Book for Education.” Fallace believes that these different approaches are “not only compatible but dependent upon each other.”
Fallace concludes his work with commentary about the impact of events in popular culture and the impact of the use of multimedia delivery of Holocaust content…Without talking specifically about artifacts, this work acts as a useful ‘pre-cursor’ to a discussion of digital artifacts and their affect on the moral evaluation of actions relating to Holocaust education.
