The challenges, issues and controversies of ‘Holocaust education’ 

Posted on 27th January, 2025

This International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Professor Andy Pearce reflects on the challenges, issues and controversies of Holocaust education in the early twenty-first century. 

Since Holocaust education has become a principal conduit for the transmission of its memory and the object of numerous national and transnational initiatives in recent decades, it would be reasonable to presume there is clarity and consensus around elemental issues. This is, however, far from the case. Following Oliver Plessow, Holocaust education can, indeed, be viewed as a ‘field’ when field is taken to mean

‘a relatively autonomous social system with certain practices, rules, and institutions, which is constituted by a system of relative positions created by competitive interaction between different agents and thus prone to constant reorganization.’

 (Plessow 2017, 317

Even so, because it is ‘part of the wider discourse on the overall significance of the Holocaust’, Plessow suggests Holocaust education ‘is also subject to the conflicts that are being waged around the globe to determine the Shoah’s discursive position in memory and history’. Accordingly, ‘struggles between competing “memory frames” mirror in the debates about suitable pedagogies of the Shoah’ .

A perception of the field of Holocaust education as one characterised by fracture and fragmentation has been borne out by a number of studies conducted in recent years. Research by the Georg Eckert Institute on the position of the Holocaust in curricula and its representation in textbooks around the world uncovered ‘general convergent and divergent tendencies’ and ‘evidence of regional convergent and divergent trends’. Accordingly, its authors described ‘an overlapping multipolar pattern which is partly global, partly regional and partly national’, prompting them to forward the notion of ‘education about Holocausts’.

Meanwhile, a major ‘meta-analysis of existing studies’ on ‘teaching and learning about the Holocaust (TLH)’ conducted under the auspices of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) found ‘the field remains in quite different states of development in different linguistic communities of scholars, and it lacks mature exchanges between those language communities’ . Tellingly, among the general conclusions forwarded by the authors of this research was the assertion ‘TLH itself is a broad umbrella with many different approaches and areas of focus. Terms such as “Holocaust education” and “teaching and learning about the Holocaust” encompass such a wide range of content and practices that it is problematic to conceive of them as a single entity’.

Such claims pose particular challenges for an organisation which describes itself as ‘promoting Holocaust education, research and remembrance since 1998’ . Yet, according to a recent policy guide produced by UNESCO, ‘the expression “Teaching and Learning about the Holocaust” is used by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’ and ‘addresses didactics and learning, under the larger umbrella of education about the Holocaust, which also comprises curricula and textbook studies’. Holocaust education, meanwhile, is defined by UNESCO as ‘efforts, in formal and non-formal settings, to teach about the Holocaust’.

One could well be forgiven for finding these developments disorienting. The phrase ‘Holocaust education’ has indeed long been problematic, suffering from the ailments of insufficient conceptualisation, lack of clarity, and imprecision. Despite this, the term has been institutionalised in a number of countries and become currency in international Holocaust politics. This does not mean, of course, that we are obliged to using ‘Holocaust education’ indefinitely; in refocusing attention on pedagogy, the phrase ‘teaching and learning about the Holocaust’ has much to commend it and is arguably preferable. However, because ‘Holocaust education’ has acquired normative dimensions  – partly through transnational initiatives promoted by organisations like the IHRA – it seems unlikely that a change in discursive frames will get good traction very quickly.

Ultimately, umbrella phrases are – by their nature – characterised by breadth and variety. They cease to be useful when they create confusion and handicap common understanding. In making sense of the growing questions around ‘Holocaust education’ it is worth reiterating that it has, for some time, been ‘largely under theorized’. On this Doyle Stevick notes, ‘a field requires a certain critical mass of data and research studies to enable the development of well-supported theory, and teaching and learning about the Holocaust is not yet in that position’. This would suggest that whether we call it ‘Holocaust education’ or ‘Teaching and Learning about the Holocaust’, we are talking about a collection of practices, principles adorned with the garbs associated with a field, but bound together by belief, conviction, and resolution rather than being housed within clear conceptual or empirical frameworks. As Eckmann and Stevick have written, ‘there is much more consensus about the importance of addressing the Holocaust than about “why, what and how to teach” it, and about how to know if those goals have been achieved’.

The coexistence of, on the one hand, consensus around addressing the Holocaust and, on the other, inability to determine what this looks like pedagogically, is both a product and cause of reductive understandings of memory, knowledge and education  – as well as the blurring of lines of separation between mnemonic and educational activity. Changes may be slowly occurring, but it remains to be seen how far new research into teaching and learning about the Holocaust, and new ways of theorising these enterprises, will affect practice in classrooms and at a policy-making level. As the IHRA study revealed, for all the diversity, certain trajectories and prevailing issues can be observed. These include the reality that teachers and students are products of their cultural milieu, the deleterious consequences that follow insufficient specialist training, and the potentially problematic ways in which memory is used to teach history, such as a ‘pedagogy of reverence’. In an ideal world, advances in research and changes in pedagogical approaches would exist in a reciprocal relationship. However, certain long-term trends have combined with more recent unforeseeable developments to add new immediacy and new pressures.

About the Author

This is an excerpt from Holocaust Education: Contemporary challenges and controversies, edited by Stuart Foster, Andy Pearce, and Alice Pettigrew. 

Andy Pearce is Associate Professor in Holocaust and History Education who has worked in Holocaust education for over ten years. He is involved in delivering CPD for teachers, in educational research, and has collaborated with the Imperial War Museum, the Wiener Holocaust Library, and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe.