If you read my work, then you know sometimes I will write with humor. This is not one of those times. There is nothing funny about this subject. But though I was not taught about the Holocaust in school until my teens, I learned about it much earlier. I had a friend who lived with his grandmother. She had a tattoo. I asked, at ten years of age, ignorantly yet without malice, why his grandma had it on her arm.
She had been a prisoner at Auschwitz. What she told me would change me forever, and I have thought about how humanity got to that point most every day since. Today, I ask the question again.
A top administrator with the Carroll Independent School District in Southlake advised teachers last week that if they have a book about the Holocaust in their classroom, they should also offer students access to a book from an “opposing” perspective, according to an audio recording obtained by NBC News.
“Just try to remember the concepts of [House Bill] 3979,” (Carroll school district’s executive director of curriculum and instruction Gina) Peddy said in the recording, referring to a new Texas law that requires teachers to present multiple perspectives when discussing “widely debated and currently controversial” issues. “And make sure that if you have a book on the Holocaust,” Peddy continued, “that you have one that has an opposing, that has other perspectives.”
This came on the heels of a parental complaint that got a teacher reprimanded for keeping an anti-racism text in the classroom. In Texas and other parts of the country (this problem is not exclusive to Texas, where almost half of the people are being held political hostage by the right wing), the far right is so emboldened that not only are they not being punished for their abhorrent ideology, that people who oppose it are actively having their careers threatened.
..The training came four days after the Carroll school board, responding to a parent’s complaint, voted to reprimand a fourth grade teacher who had kept an anti-racism book in her classroom.
We are headed towards some kind of cultural breaking point. When asked how could someone teach against the reality of the Holocaust, Peddy said,
“Believe me, it’s come up.”
Now for perspective, as david54 points out below in the comments, it is entirely possible she was straddling a line and trying to get teachers to read between the lines to see how absurd Texas code is. If this is so I wish she would have done so explicitly. That administrators are forced to even consider such machinations as opposing texts even with something as horrifying as the holocaust is fair to consider as david54 points out, the larger point.
Nevertheless she advised fealty to Texas code. If she was trying to point out the obvious absurdities I wish she would have done so clearly.
She still could. But to this point she has not.
However I will allow for the possiblity she meant well.
But thanks to such brutal laws, and malevolent legislatures, I am no longer of a mindset that a Civil War is a threat.
It is here.
It might not be with bullets, but they are using school boards as the battlefield and the minds of children as the territory at stake.
How do we keep history from repeating, if the teaching of history is banned, or the ugliness of the past, is glorified?
-ROC
I am weak, dealing with a stretch of fatigue I have been unable to pinpoint. We continue to monitor for cancer recurrence. This is the only living my health allows me to earn and I appreciate you. My newsletter is unaffected. Sign up here to subscribe! It publishes every Wednesday and is full of original reporting, laughs, and fun!
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-ROC