Teaching About Genocide: The Law and The Reality

4/24/2007
Chicago Public Radio
Producer: Spitzer, Gabriel

People around the world today are commemorating the Armenian Genocide. During World War One and earlier, more than a million Armenians died in massacres and death marches under Ottoman Turkish rule.

The vast majority of scholars consider it the first genocide of the 20th Century – though the Turkish government fervently denies it.

Illinois is one of 11 states that require schools to teach about genocides. But it’s unclear how many are meeting that mandate … and whether teachers have what they need to follow the law.

Chicago Public Radio’s Gabriel Spitzer has the story.

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Ron Levitsky’s public-school education in Des Plains was a little thin on late Ottoman Imperial Turkey.

He’s probably not alone on this one. History teachers have a tough time getting kids to remember what happened at Gettysburg, let alone the Eastern Anatolia region in Europe.

But Levitsky, now an 8th-grade history teacher in Northfield, says that means students miss one of the 20th century’s most important historical chapters.

LEVITSKY: I honestly had not even heard about the Armenian Genocide for the longest time. And ironically one of my closest friends is Armenian and he began to tell me about this. And I began to investigate, and I was really shocked to find out that this had happened.

Levitsky says he did learn about the Holocaust in school.

Illinois has mandated teaching the Holocaust since 1990. But Levitsky says most students aren’t learning about other genocides – like those in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur.

LEVITSKY: Looking, you know, 30 years, nothing much has changed. And that shocks me. And my students, the fact that they are generally shocked that there are these other genocide, that there’s a pattern. If it was just the holocaust, it’s an aberration. But when the kids began to see that there’s a pattern, they’re really shocked.

(Ambi library)

In the library here at Sunset Ridge School, groups of students are using art to explore the meaning of genocide.

This group of four is composing a poem.

STUDENTS: The destruction of Smyrra was so great, that they just all started to be exterminate ... the number was difficult to calculate … guys, let’s just not have it rhyme. …. Yes, we’re having it rhyme, Patrick … (fade under)

It looks a lot like any hands-on type learning project. Some kids are quiet, a few are gabbing while others meticulously draw or write.

But students say this class is different. They say genocide is hard to talk about, but on a gut level they know it’s important.

This is Charlie Engelman.

ENGELMAN: When Mr. Levitsky, our teacher like mentions it in class, you can tell, we all kinda get quiet and like don’t really laugh or talk as much as we usually do during class time. I didn’t know that people could be that bad and do such horrible things. Sure, there are bad leaders out there, but who could, like, order, like, hundreds of thousands of people to walk through a desert until they starve and die? I mean, like, what’s the point of that?

(fade to black)

Those same feelings of shock and outrage moved a group of state legislators.

Two years ago, they pushed through a bill forcing Illinois to pull its investments form Sudan – a rebuke to that government over atrocities in Darfur.

Fresh off that fight, the lawmakers moved to raise awareness about genocide.

Senator Jacqueline Collins sponsored a bill to require schools to teach about a range of genocides. She says she sees it as an extension of the human-rights legacy of Martin Luther King and John F. Kennedy.

COLLINS: This is a way of validating that this atrocity did occur, we were a witness to it, and never again. The law passed with overwhelming support.

But some critics complain there’s no provision to enforce or even measure compliance with the law, and no money to help schools implement it.

Dr. Jeff Ellison heads the history program at Bernard Zell Anshe Emet Day School. He says the new requirement joins a long list of unfunded social science mandates.

ELLISON: (Flipping pages). Holocaust, Irish Famine … study of women …. Arbor and Bird Day are among the mandates. And it’s in the same grouping as genocide.

Ellison conducted and published the only rigorous study of how well Illinois schools are teaching the Holocaust.

He found that the vast majority of teachers do cover the Holocaust. But he says there’s little consistency in what or how much educators are teaching. The law just requires a unit of study. That could mean a three-week exploration, or a 15-minute lecture.

Now beside the Holocaust, the expanded mandate throws in an additional half-dozen genocides to learn about.

ELLISON: I’ve spent 15 years of my life trying to understand the Holocaust. And if it took me that long, how are we going to expect teachers to so quickly learn about all of the contexts that these genocides take place?

Ellison’s study found the biggest variable affecting how much time teachers devote to the Holocaust was whether or not they had any training – the more teachers knew, the more they taught.

Senator Collins argues teachers already have what they need.

COLLINS: I mean, a lot of this material you can pull just from the internet. I don’t think it takes training to view history from a moral perspective. To say what’s wrong or right. There’s no special training, it just means being human.
With no money attached to the mandate, the burden falls largely on teachers and school districts.

It’s up to them to pay for training, to buy materials and develop curriculum.

(Ambi hallway)

The crux of Ron Levitsky’s curriculum is forcing students to ask themselves how they would act in the face of injustice.

LEVITSKY: Learning doesn’t mean you do anything. That leap from learning to doing is huge. And all we can do here is kind of prepare you, and hope that when the time comes, and hopefully it never would come, that you’d be able to take that leap.

The law now requires schools to teach this subject, but it doesn’t tell them how.

So educators have to ask themselves: why is it important to teach genocide? Is it a history lesson about a war? Or part of a broader education on character and respect? Or is it, as Senator Collins says, to make real that ringing pledge of Never Again?

Ron Levitsky teaches his students that it’s all of those things…and that’s just the start.

I’m Gabriel Spitzer, Chicago Public Radio.

Note: Above are excerpts from the article. The full article appears here. Clarifications and comments by me are contained in {}. Deletions are marked by [...]. The bold emphasis is mine.