Let’s Have Middle-Schoolers Debate Whether the Holocaust Happened!

A group of eighth-grade
teachers in the Rialto Unified School District (that’s east of Los
Angeles in the Inland Empire of Southern California) decided that a
good way to teach their students effective debate skills in writing
is to ask them to take a side on whether the Holocaust happened and
back up their arguments with facts. You don’t need an
Upworthy-style headline to figure out what happened after news got
out about the students’ assignment. Outrage! Death threats! And so
the school district
will not repeat the assignment. From The Sun of San
Bernardino, California:

Throughout the day Monday, the district fielded angry calls from
parents, a death threat and a flurry of media inquiries over the
assignment, which district officials initially defended as an
effort to teach students to think critically. Ultimately, however,
administrators acknowledged the assignment was in poor taste and
promised it would not be given again.

“Our interim superintendent will be talking with our Educational
Services Department to assure that any references to the Holocaust
‘not occurring’ will be stricken on any current or future
Argumentative Research projects,” district spokeswoman Syeda Jafri
said in a prepared statement late Sunday.

Initially, seconds before it turned into a massive public
relations disaster, the school district was
defending the assignment to The Sun as part of Common
Core requirements to teach critical thinking. In an early response,
one school board member said, “Current events are part of the basis
for measuring IQ. The Middle East, Israel, Palestine and the
Holocaust are on newscasts discussing current events. Teaching how
to come to your own conclusion based on the facts, test your
position, be able to articulate that position, then defend your
belief with a lucid argument is essential to good citizenship.”

The Holocaust is a current event? Anyway, I can see both where
this bus was going and why it was never going to get there. What if
dozens of students decided to argue that the Holocaust didn’t
happen, given the
small amount of information provided by the writing assignment?
Even though I believe the slaughter obviously did happen, I could
easily see the argumentative eighth grade version of me trying to
argue the other side just to prove I was clever. Imagine the kind
of public relations disaster it would have been if it got out that
a bunch of Rialto students wrote that the Holocaust didn’t happen
in a school assignment. Imagine being those kids’ parents.

This is not to say engaging in a look at Holocaust denial
theories should be beyond the bounds of education, but perhaps not
in 8th grade and not as a homework assignment on writing
skills?

Also, the controversy is a good reminder that even when they’re
actually trying to teach critical thinking skills instead of
suppressing them, public schools sometimes struggle with doing so
in a sensible way. If I were a parent, I’d be more concerned about
how quickly the school district Godwinned itself by selecting a
subject with such an obvious desired outcome and not something that
would actually lead to diverse answers and debate. Will they
replace the assignment with a debate over whether man actually
landed on the moon next? Or whether the world is round or flat? Or
maybe this is the public school version of teaching critical
skills—only tackling obvious cases where determining the “right”
answer is a breeze.