Connecting the dots: helping Year 9 to debate the purposes of Holocaust and genocide education

Why do we teach about the Holocaust and about other genocides? The Holocaust has been a compulsory part of the English National Curriculum since 1991; however, curriculum documents say little about why pupils should learn about the Holocaust or about what they should learn. Tamsin Leyman and Richard Harris decided to use the opportunity presented by the recent National Curriculum review to explore these issues with pupils, some of whom had studied other genocides and some of whom had not. Their article reports how students responded to the challenge in the context of learning about the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide and argues that asking students to think about why and how they are learning about these topics has beneficial effects, not least on students' thinking about the significance of the Holocaust...