Seems a teacher in Albany, NY has evoked a major fail.
Students were asked to watch and read Nazi propaganda, then pretend their teacher was a Nazi government official who needed to be convinced of their loyalty. In five paragraphs, they were required to prove that Jews were the source of Germany's problems.
The exercise was intended to challenge students to formulate a persuasive argument and was given to three classes, Albany Superintendent Marguerite Vanden Wyngaard said. She said the assignment should have been worded differently.
emphasis added
How could this happen, you ask?
Vanden Wyngaard said the exercise reflects the type of writing expected of students under the new Common Core curriculum, the tough new academic standards that require more sophisticated writing. Such assignments attempt to connect English with history and social studies.
emphasis added
If you make your way to article in the Albany Times Union, the reactions in the comments are largely about shock and outrage. And that's not wrong - but it shouldn't be where the discussion stops.
Nowhere is the teacher portrayed as a Nazi sympathizer or an anti-semite. It's not proven that the teacher was attempting to indoctrinate the students. The Core Curriculum after all is what called for linking English with history and social studies. A charitable interpretation is that the teacher was trying to do just that - challenge the students to take what they had learned in history and social studies and use a writing exercise to experience for themselves what it was like to live in Germany in the 1930's, where being able to rationalize the inexcusable was a survival skill.
There's a larger lesson to be learned here - the question is, is that what the overall aim was? Any honest look at history and social studies is full of horrifying, hideous events. If anyone has ever read Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, the account of the genocide Christopher Columbus presided over in the New World is not easy to read even today - and yet Columbus Day is still a national holiday.
We're not ready to face up to that. It should not be surprising to find that exposing students to a practical exercise in understanding how it is possible for people to put together words in a way that justifies the unjustifiable is too dangerous for most people to deal with. So much of our view of the world and our place in it is based on shared denial of a lot of unpleasant things we'd rather not think about.
That willful blindness, that inability to face up the awful and inconvenient truths of our world may ultimately prove to be our downfall as a society and a civilization. If we can't teach our children about these things, is it surprising we have so much trouble dealing with them as adults? The skills those students were being tasked to develop - i.e.: formulate a persuasive argument - are too often presented without context. It's not enough to equip them with tools if they are not also equipped to consider the consequences of their use. (I can guarantee you that the staff at Albany High School is now painfully aware of teaching in a larger context.)
FWIW, here's the comment I posted to the article in the Times Union.
Welcome to the world of Teaching to the Test, people.
More and more of what happens in the classroom is being dictated from afar; teachers have less and less control over what they can or can not teach, and how to teach it. But - they're being held accountable for the results. Get grades up or else, and make sure students can regurgitate on demand whatever has been deemed proper for them to know to prepare them for the world of work.
Two points to the teacher for trying to shake up the kids and make them actually think, minus about 50 bazillion points for not anticipating the predictable freak out. It's actually pretty good preparation for the 'real world' - practice spouting back to an authority figure what they want to hear, no matter how repugnant.
Congratulations to the third of the students who refused to complete the assignment. That attitude will serve you well in a job market where increasingly workers have no right to challenge anything their bosses ask them to do.
And for those people so strongly outraged over the whole idea of kids being exposed to Nazi propaganda and how authoritarianism works, two more points:
1) If kids never see this stuff for themselves and how it works, how will they learn to recognize it in other forms when they're out on their own in life? We're talking about high school students here, not little children. They need to know before we turn them loose as adults.
2) Two thirds of the class did NOT refuse to do the assignment. Think they learned a little about how something like Nazi Germany could happen - or why America should be a little more careful about assuming how 'exceptional' we are as a country?
Teaching is a dangerous business - or should be if it's done right.
UPDATE: The Times Union has a follow up on events at Albany High School since the story broke.
The Albany school district has placed on leave a teacher whose persuasive writing assignment was for students to argue that Jews are evil in order to convince a Nazi official of their loyalty.
The teacher was not in class at Albany High School on Friday and Superintendent Marguerite Vanden Wyngaard said the district will take some form of disciplinary action. She said it was too early to say exactly what that would be, but it could range from a letter of reprimand to termination. She did not say when the district would allow the teacher back in the classroom and suggested it may not happen before the end of the year. The district will also bring in sensitivity trainers from the Anti-Defamation League to work with teachers and students before the end of the school year.
There has been reaction from around the country, mostly condemnatory. The reaction here at Daily Kos has been strong as well. Some additional info about the assignment is filling out the context in which it occurred.
Students in three sophomore English classes received the assignment earlier this week in preparation for reading Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel's acclaimed memoir "Night," said Emily Karandy, 16. She said a lot of her classmates in honors English were upset at the assignment and felt terrible while working on it. She said she eventually wrote the five paragraph essay because she didn't want to hurt her grade.
"I was putting it off because I didn't want to think about it and I didn't want to say anything bad about Jewish people," she said. "We thought it would make more sense if we were Jews arguing against Nazis." Karandy said she felt "horrible" when she turned in her essay.
Karandy also said her teacher — whom the Times Union is not naming — liked to challenge the class and she had never heard any racially charged remarks from the teacher.
emphasis added
Based on the additional information in this latest article, I'm going to venture a guess that the writing assignment was not an isolated event, but was intended to be part of a larger historic context, the set-up as it were to reading Night. I'd also suspect the teacher was attempting to challenge the class by forcing them to confront the choices made in Germany, and the way people rationalized them. Take "She said she eventually wrote the five paragraph essay because she didn't want to hurt her grade." and it's to see how that dreadful logic is so easy to fall into.
It's very easy to teach that the Nazis were absolutely evil and leave it at that. It's not so easy to teach how to understand how that evil came to be - or how it operates today. Or how accessible it is to ordinary people for ordinary reasons, especially when given Official Approval. And there is a very real danger that the angry response this class exercise has engendered will prevent people from understanding those issues.
There is a book by Bob Harris which came out last month, "The International Bank of Bob - Connecting Our Worlds One $25 Kiva Loan at a Time" that is a must-read. It documents some of the incredibly appalling conditions around the world, and how people are finding ways to do something about them. The things Harris documents in the book will boggle your mind, as he travels the world to see how Kiva loans work in practice.
Reading about places like Sarajevo and Rwanda is horrifying. What people are trying to recover from there to rebuild their lives is in many ways as appalling as what happened under Hitler. Imagine being in a town square filled with lots of concrete slabs, and suddenly realizing the signs there are asking you to "Please do not stand on the mass graves". Look around you and realize that the crowds around you contain people who not that long ago were committing atrocities against people who had been their friends and neighbors. They are walking around free today because there is no prison large enough to hold everyone who participated in some way, no way to have a country if everyone is locked up.
This isn't ancient history. This isn't explained just by saying EVIL and looking away. This is about the ways people go about being people. They can work miracles, or they can go horribly wrong. It can happen anywhere. 150 years ago this country ripped itself apart; the death toll in some of those battle is still unsurpassed. And we're still having trouble coping with the fall out from that conflict. If we won't look at these things, really look at them, we can never be sure they won't happen to us, or that we won't bring them about.
For what it's worth, my take on this is that the most dangerous thing that happened at Albany High School was a teacher attempting to push students out of their comfort zones. The ferocity of the response from the community is in no small measure an indication that people are really, really afraid these days to look at what lies lurking out there...