Too Frank

In a sudden move to reform French Holocaust education, French President Nicholas Sarkozy announced in February an unprecedented new curriculum for fifth graders learning about the Holocaust. Every fifth-grade classroom in France will henceforth be assigned to a French child-victim of the Holocaust, about whose life the students will be required to learn. If Sarkozy’s personal life and politics were under fire before, his new mandate has sparked a conflagration. But despite the criticisms of the French left, Sarkozy’s heart seems to be in the right place—it is his planning that has gone awry.

After nearly 75,000 French Jews were handed over to the Germans by the Vichy government during World War II, atonement on behalf of the current French government seems altogether appropriate. Asking ten-year-olds to read about the horrific deaths of their fellow children, however, may not be the best way to do this. Sarkozy is not an educator, and as a consequence his attempt to design a comprehensive curriculum for schoolchildren is inane in comparison to his political decisions. Sarkozy obviously never consulted French educators on his plans for the French education system, ignoring both the logistics of implementation and the psychology of the children he would influence. It would serve him well to listen to the people chosen by the French to educate their children.

Another shortcoming of such a mode of Holocaust education is its narrow scope. Children are all too likely to become embroiled in the personal horror of the individual they are studying and thus miss the horror of the Holocaust as a whole. Even the horror of the Holocaust as a whole does not properly illustrate the horror of war crimes and genocide as a whole. The French government’s demons are far too numerous to be exorcised with education about the Holocaust alone. The French government has committed atrocities equal in scope and destruction in its bloody history of slavery and colonialism. The implications of those actions are as salient today as those of the Holocaust, for contemporary genocides like Darfur echo the cruelty of both colonialism and the Holocaust. Considering French history and global current events, the best curriculum for French students would be one that emphasizes all of France’s past mistakes and encourages children to prevent them from being repeated today.