"To develop their critical thinking skills!!!"
Hat tip Atlas Shrugs
I am cross-posting this story direct from Atlas Shrugs because Pam Geller says it quite well. In the Rialto, California School District, students are being assigned to write an essay arguing whether the Holocaust actually happened or was invented to "influence public emotion and gain".
http://pamelageller.com/2014/05/california-school-district-defends-writing-assignment-confirming-denying-holocaust.html/
First of all, even Germany admits to the Holocaust and educates its younger generations about what happened-at least since the late 1960s when their younger generation started asking questions of their parents and demanding answers. Of course, that was in West Germany. East Germany maintained the fiction that only West Germans were Nazis while East Germans were heroic communist resistance fighters. Today, however, Germany has accepted full responsibility for what happened.
Apparently not so in Mr Mohammed Z. Islam's school district.
Furthermore, this stuff about people exploiting the Holocaust for their own purposes and gain is a modern-day anti-Jewish canard. The fact that certain Jewish idiots like Norman Finkelstein have bought into it does not lessen that fact. It is nothing more than code language for anti-Jewish hate.
How in the world does having students debate events that are well-documented and even conceded by the perpetrators enhance their critical thinking skills? You might as well have them write theses that argue that the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus really exist.
This is nothing more than an exercise in prepping these kids for when they enter college and start hearing about that "evil apartheid country called Israel".
Whoever is responsible for this disgrace should be fired.
*Update: The school district has announced that this lesson plan has been cancelled.
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2014/05/05/california-school-district-cancels-lesson-plan-that-involved-holocaust-denial/
This lesson plan sounds skewed, but so is the chorus of criticism. Students SHOULD be able to argue from documented facts (not spouted opinions) what did happen in history. For the most part, arguing that the Churban Europa did happen, on a horrifically massive scale, should be the net outcome of any such assignment.
ReplyDeleteFor those who maintain otherwise, they should be held to rigorous standard to document and sustain their argument, and, facts being stubborn things, held to a certain level of ridicule if they persist in their opinion while being unable to provide credible substantiation.
To scream that the historical account should never be questioned is not helpful to the credibility that General Eisenhower did so much to preserve.