The Earth Isn’t Flat: Teaching Both Sides of the Holocaust

Parents and educators ought to promote robust learning that gives students the tools to arrive at their own opinions. This notion shouldn’t be controversial.

As parents trying to raise whole humans, we want our children, especially as they enter their high school and then college years, to be taught different perspectives on a whole host of things.

Not from random people who just spew out whatever cockamamie theories come to mind, but if there are different expert perspectives on the causes of economic disparities; or a debate on how to solve crime; or whether trickle-down economics is good or bad; or even sides of something as polarizing as the abortion debate. We shouldn’t fear meaty discussions.

In an agree with me or you’re bad culture, we do our maturing children a disservice by discouraging them to use analytical skills. To dismiss perspectives that are different from our own. We harm them when we oppose challenging information from entering their minds.

We create nothing more than a new breed of parrots if we don’t allow our children to have pertinent information available to them to make informed decisions. To arrive at their own conclusions. Whether it has to do with politics, career choices or anything else.

When we oppose the teaching of critical race theory to older students, a theory which examines the interplay with race, society, and our legal and institutional structures, we’re essentially telling our kids, “Do not consider information or ideas that are different than what you’ve been taught so far when it comes to race.”

When we deny swaths of history about our country’s founders, left out of our history books for generations — or attack the teaching of how racism played a major factor in how America created wealth — what we’re really doing on a much bigger scale is ensuring that our kids never develop any critical thinking skills.

I’m left scratching my head.

If the ideas we’ve been taught thus far on race are so indestructible, the lofty “judge everyone on the content of their character” idea that rolls off the tongue, what’s there to fear?

If CRT is just the equivalent of teaching that the Easter Bunny is real, won’t it ultimately fall to better ideas? Some of us have no problem insisting that schools teach alternative Biblical theories about the first humans, yet are adamant we dare not teach young adults about CRT, ironically claiming it’s all BS.

After all, a major premise of free speech is to get ideas in the marketplace so the best ones prevail. So that ideas get tested against each other and the good ones survive. It’s the reason why nobody is advocating to take away voting rights for women, despite being a polarizing topic a century ago. The best idea won out.

Of course, we don’t need to offer up education to children that is downright absurd. Nobody needs to teach kids that slavery didn’t exist. Or that storks deliver babies. Or that there are two sides to the Holocaust, as some racists have suggested in Texas and Ohio.

But for most of the rest of our age-appropriate ideas, let our children have information so they can grow into critical-thinking, solution-oriented, independent adults.

I guess there were technically two sides of the Holocaust. The good side and the racist, genocidal side.

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This post was previously published on Parent Is Born.

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