Teaching Holocaust in Schools

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Teaching Holocaust in Schools

The Holocaust was a horrible event in the history of the modern world.

Millions of people were needlessly and ruthlessly exterminated at the

hands of the Nazis. There are few people in Britain who feel that the

Holocaust should not be taught in schools. While it is important to

teach about the Holocaust to children, it will be in vain if we do not

know why we do it. My high school is a diverse one and there are many

reasons why it should be taught there.

One of the most important reasons has been summed up rather well by

George Santayana, an American philosopher and poet. His famous line

is, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

In spirit, this unoriginal quotation says that if you do not learn

what went wrong in the past, then the same mistake will happen again.

If it does not get taught, then people will forget. And that is

dangerous. In fact, the dangers of it have already been seen this

decade. As less and less people were getting education on the

Holocaust, less and less people were paying attention to the world

around them. Nobody noticed when a civil war in the former Yugoslavia

turned into almost a replica of the Nazi's Holocaust. Concentration

camps, mass graves, genocide, just as in Germany, yet nobody noticed.

While less and less British people were getting educated on the

Holocaust, less and less noticed the concentration camps,

totalitarianism, and religious persecution in the People's Republic of

China. Less and less noticed because less and less people knew that

they should notice. Therefore, if the children of Britain do not learn

about the Holocaust, they will be condemned to repeat it.

As you may imagine with any public school, there are not too many

Jewish students. That is not to say that the student population is not

diverse, because it is. In fact, that student diversity leads to

another reason why the holocaust should be taught in my school. While

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