![]() In relation to RE, hope for a better future motivates a community’s calls for remembrance. Without an appreciation of the context, hope or anticipation that the whole will be reunited recedes from view (usually replaced by its opposite, fear). Hope motivates the organism to restore balance to the unsettled environment. Without an awareness of context, especially the nature of the problem that initiated the disruption, there is no way for the organism to successfully reunify the whole and, in turn, grow. Progress indicates the organism’s steady advance towards reunification of the whole. An organism grows when it overcomes a disruption to the harmonious balance it maintains with its environment. ![]() Growth here is understood as context-sensitive development. Growth for Dewey has many meanings, but for our purposes the most important of them connects hope and progress in a biological metaphor. Hope, growth and progress - what I have elsewhere termed the “three cornerstones of pragmatism” - should inform any Dewey-inspired account of remembrance education. Still others believe that the point of Holocaust education is to facilitate the interaction between young people and survivors, who have the “experiential authority of being there and telling it like it was.” Others see it as a way to remind students that they have an individual moral duty “to remember” the Holocaust, its perpetrators and its victims. Some Holocaust historians and educators insist that the primary reason for learners to study this mass genocide event is to prevent the tragedy from reoccurring. ![]() Īlthough there is relative consensus on the need for Holocaust programs, the rationale for them varies. A dense network of associations and non-governmental organizations committed to Holocaust education sprung out of the ITF meetings. On January 27, 2000, the ITF was revisited, once again in Sweden, but this time involving experts and politicians from 13 nations. On May 7, 1998, the International Task Force on Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research (ITF) was founded at the ‘Meeting on the Holocaust’ hosted by Sweden and attended by historians and diplomats from U.S. Given the scale and horror of Nazi Germany’s genocidal campaign as well as the sheer number of communities affected by this tragedy, educating students about the Holocaust is treated as the paradigmatic case for RE. Perhaps the most widely recognized RE projects are holocaust education programs. Lest we forget the events and relive the horrors, the reasoning goes, it is necessary to teach younger generations about these terrible past events, their antecedent conditions and the grotesque consequences of collective amnesia and malaise.Īccording to Ann Chinnery, “if students are going to grapple with some of the more unsettling realities of the past, they will need a different kind of history education and a different experience of our ethical obligations to and for the past.” In the wake of human tragedy - such as the Holocaust, Chicago’s dark history of police torture and the New Zealand mosque attack - public calls for remembrance are commonplace. Instead, RE’s purpose is to integrate learners into a community, a community of memory, where they are witnesses, judges and guardians of the memories of tragic past events. Unlike traditional history education, the point of RE is not the straightforward teaching of historical facts (if that is even possible). Remembrance Education (RE) indicates “an attitude of active respect in contemporary society based on the collective remembrance of human suffering that is caused by forms of human behavior such as war, intolerance or exploitation, and that must not be forgotten.”
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