The Age of Auschwitz, The Nuclear Age
Breakstone, David
THE AGE OF AUSCHWITZ. THE NUCLEAR AGE Students confront history and themselves as they learn to think about thinking DAVID BREAKSTONE MARGARET MERGER Coincidence or pattern? Just as the national...
...Although the curriculum states emphatically that nuclear weapons are dangerous, no single solution to the danger is advocated...
...It's hard and painful for me to imagine the impact a nuclear holocaust would have on my life and that of my friends and relatives...
...and Soviet public...
...One week-long activity involves role-playing American leadership and Soviet leadership trying to negotiate a treaty for the Cuban missile crisis that will in some way diminish the dangers of nuclear weaponry...
...We don't hear very good things about the Soviet Union here...
...the truth can empower us to act, not condemn us to mere spectator roles...
...I want to live to be 75...
...It's hard for me to think seriously of the future when there is the terrifying reality that I and all of those around me may not even exist in the future...
...and Soviet military and the U.S...
...Could the activity of thinking, as such...
...Students discuss ethics in three simplified but clear categories—rights theories, consequence theories and self-interest theories...
...The curriculum include stories about adults who have struggled with ethical questions—soldiers, scientists and pilots reflecting on the bombing of Hiroshima...
...Dante says that the lowest circle of Hell is reserved for those people who remain neutral in a moral crisis...
...I was in Washington this morning pleading for the continuation of our Title IV grant...
...Kosta Tsipis, a physicist at MIT who wrote explanatory sections on basic physics and the terrible effects of the bomb, teaches parts of the curriculum in his own courses at MIT...
...The negotiated treaty must then be sold to a majority of the 14 interest groups affected, including the Warsaw Pact, NATO, the Communist Party, the U.S...
...What is our political process...
...David Breakstone is a medical writer and editor...
...At the end of the exercise, students compare their treaty with the historic one...
...The resource center, workshop and offices buzz with the energy of staff and students who seem to be doing ten tasks simultaneously...
...Finally, the impulse to act is deeply personal...
...I hope that someday we will learn to work with and for our common bonds and goals, and that we will believe in giving life, instead of taking it away...
...We as adults must learn to serve them better...
...Although the list includes people who believe an escalated arms race is our best defense, the majority of the public figures on the list have taken a stand against nuclear weapons...
...Her wide-ranging, allusive narrative rarely sounds preachy or maudlin...
...I can't say...
...Sometimes even my husband is a little baffled by how deeply immersed I am in this work...
...The final chapter contains a list of individuals and groups who are active and effective in the debate on arms control...
...Instead, the course begins with the neutrality of technology and the ethical choices of humans...
...I wouldn't have believed anything could have gotten me so excited about teaching again...
...It does not begin with devastating descriptions of nuclear holocaust...
...I'm starting a book, and I'd like to finish it...
...Just the bad things, like the invasion of Afghanistan, or the possible invasion of Poland...
...The authors include Jules Pfeiffer, Robert Kennedy, George Kennan, Mary McGrory, Leonard Bernstein and St...
...Many students describe their sense of empowerment: "I feel more closely involved with present day issues and I feel stronger about my opinions...
...Clearly she has made this presentation many times before and she speaks easily, precisely and passionately, without the aid of notes...
...Because two-thirds of their U.S...
...The story begins in a rabbi's study in the fall of 1974...
...Within two months, Bobbie Snow, already on the staff, became coordinator of the nuclear program...
...Margot Strom has been asked to explain and justify the Holocaust curriculum to the faculty of a suburban junior high school south of Boston...
...I am Roman Catholic and I like everything about the religion and don't find it boring...
...Several years earlier they had begun thinking about teaching nuclear issues...
...A student asked her teacher why she had chosen to teach about nuclear issues...
...Its sixth revision is just off the press in a 12-chapter, 400-page book which bears almost no resemblance to the slick and sparse treatment of the subject in the standard commercial textbooks...
...Or, as Margot Strom puts it, "In our work—both on the Holocaust and now on the nuclear issue—we keep coming back to what Milton Mayer found when he went to Germany to find out why Germans under the Nazis stopped caring...
...We think it is crucial for educators, for everyone...
...As for my future, it's hard to say...
...I hope that in reading this letter you will gain some knowledge of me as a person rather than an enemy, an alien, a social security number...
...Suddenly, nearly everything is connected and personally important to my life...
...Interest in nuclear issues began to blossom last year...
...Facing History and Ourselves," a social studies project, has been part of the Brookline, Massachusetts, eighth grade public school curriculum since the implementation of the first draft of the Holocaust curriculum in 1976, and by now its impact has been felt well beyond this Boston suburb...
...Students are asked to avoid simple answers, to think about thinking, to enlarge their perspectives...
...When I listen to students or read their letters to the Soviet leaders, I'm reminded of the Emperor's new clothes...
...In May only one or two participants at each workshop listed "nuclear weapons" as a concern...
...Bobbie Snow says that what keeps her going is the students' eagerness to confront the issues...
...The dramatic escalation of interest in nuclear policy, spurred by the movement across America for a bilateral nuclear freeze, does not in itself explain the volume of requests Strom and Parsons are now receiving...
...I think this course should have existed earlier," said one student...
...Students also need models for responding to the nuclear issues...
...Their intense feelings, including panic, move them to search for answers...
...When children study the Holocaust, they constantly return to two questions: 'Who was to blame?' and 'When could the victims and victimiz-ers have made other choices?' Students understand that at some critical point, few, if any, choices remain...
...The curriculum speaks to humanity's enormous capacity for evil as well as good...
...Last year we had two boxes of materials on the floor, one labeled 'nuclear weapons' and one labeled 'nuclear power.' Now we can't keep up...
...I do feel responsible—responsible for the well-being of my community and my world...
...Will I devote my life to a profession or something I strongly believe in...
...Students are bewildered about the future...
...He clinched my decision...
...We asked ourselves, 'Is this considered a Jewish subject only...
...In spite of this, I would be equally grieved if your country was annihilated by nuclear war—I'm sure much skill and knowledge would be lost...
...We only know about the government, not the people...
...Students describe themselves, their concerns and th^ir plans for the future...
...A typical reaction to the class is: "I hope everybody in the whole country will learn what we are learning here...
...a remarkable $200,000 was gathered in less than six months...
...Lewis describes a seventh grade student who began the course by saying, "We ought to just nuke the Russians and get it over with...
...One German reported, 'I didn't have time to think...
...There are bad people in the U.S...
...The teachers were ready...
...I am, of course, referring to nuclear war...
...I hope we have a future for me...
...Students begin to think about taking risks now—not in some distant future—but now, on the playgrounds, in their homes, with their friends...
...You begin to understand how every political event contains choices which someone somewhere is having to make at that very moment...
...While writing this letter, I tried to see the Russians as real people, people who have hopes, worries, fears...
...Max Laufer, a Brookline dentist, and Dr...
...In bringing me up, my parents have tried to instill a sense of responsibility in me...
...She smiles often, phrases her "lessons" in colloquial language, and the hint of a southern—Memphis—accent softens her message...
...Another student began by saying political decisions ought to be based on whether our weapons are stronger than the Russians...
...That I was grading papers...
...In writing this letter I hope to communicate with you the basic hopes and fears that I feel people have, perhaps all over the world...
...Students sometimes ask, "But what can we do right now...
...That curriculum has by now been officially adopted, at least in substantial part, by 54 school systems in 46 states...
...I just saw a fight and I had to think about what to do...
...The intent is not to overwhelm or shock the students but to give them ways of thinking about decision making in this complex area...
...Now 40 teachers from junior high through college are teaching all or part of the curriculum in three-to-ten-week segments...
...What are the components for decision making in the political arena...
...Later in the course, the entire class, including the original speaker, said that this opinion was "too narrow, too simple-minded...
...The Philosophy Department at the University of Massachusetts uses part of the curriculum in a course on ethical decision making...
...Scientists participating in the work of the Council for a Livable World are analyzing and evaluating sections of the material...
...Students often confront teachers, asking that they speak from their feelings, their personal fears...
...Were only Jews involved in those catastrophic events...
...I reread Dante last summer...
...But students insist on discussing the time before the choiceless choices, the time before the final Holocaust, when individuals could have made other decisions...
...Let us admit it: We are all eroded and prevented by fear from thinking about painful and controversial questions...
...What about the vic-timizers, the so-called innocent bystanders, and all the forces involved in the crushing events of the wars?' We believed it included the history of the Christian world as well...
...Superintendent Sperber was again influential and supportive...
...I guess I think he's right...
...All the students in the "Decision Making in a Nuclear Age" course at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School enthusiastically agree that the subject is important and that more sections of the course should be taught...
...Just responding to inquiries is now the work of several volunteers...
...When Bill Parsons and I began to teach a Holocaust unit in 1976, he was a Gentile in a predominantly Gentile school...
...Sperber, leader of one of the highest achieving school systems in the country, was ready to explore the idea...
...Not die at 12 or 13...
...Really all of what our curriculum and our teaching is about is captured by Rodin in those astonishing giant doors...
...Francis Kelsey and Helen Taussig banning thalidomide from sale in the U.S...
...A false warning, a quick temper or a disagreement could end life as we know it...
...One confided, "I think to myself, what if my little boy grows up and the bombs drop, and he asks me, 'What were you doing that was so important that you didn't have time or guts to fight against nuclear bombs?' What am I going to say to him...
...Children go to the heart of the matter, and they tell the truth...
...Elizabeth Lewis, an eighth grade teacher, was then hired to write curriculum...
...Therein lies a tale—and, perhaps, a moral as well...
...We are a happy family with strong ideas about everything...
...Thomas Aquinas...
...It is equally hard to imagine what your society and culture are like...
...be among the conditions that make men abstain from evil-doing or even actually condition them against it?'" The new segment, "Decision Making in a Nuclear Age," is an extension of the same life-and-death analytic decision making so patiently refined in the "Holocaust and Human Behavior" work of the preceding six years...
...Sometimes I think that they might, in fact, invent new solutions, new ways to deal with the problems...
...The Facing History and Ourselves Project was also ready...
...She says, "Doing the Holocaust curriculum is the most important teaching I've ever known...
...In the end, educated people matter, especially if they are educated not in information alone but in ethics and decency...
...I didn't stop it, but I keep thinking about it and it's all your fault.' "This course is about obedience, peer pressure, the abuse of authority, and justice...
...Department of Education Title IV money (given to 300 model projects nationwide) had been cut, the project began its own fund raising...
...I must teach...
...A range of materials, appropriate for many reading levels, includes fiction, scientific explanations, cartoons, charts, editorials, simulation games, debates, parables and case studies...
...I can only tell you of myself, and hope that we have some common bond...
...And now the requests for information and materials have begun to inundate the modest offices in Brook-line, Massachusetts, where Margot Strom and Bill Parsons supervise the work...
...Robert Sperber, Superintendent of Schools in Brookline, were waiting for a social action committee meeting convened by Rabbi Roland Gittlesohn of Temple Margaret Metzger is a freelance writer and a teacher in the English department at Brookline High School...
...Elizabeth Lewis asserts that this letter-writing effort is a chance for students to articulate their own individuality and humanity...
...J. Robert Op-penheimer once arguing that the quest for all knowledge is the scientist's responsibility and that the use and consequences of invention belong to the politicians...
...The first albums have been delivered to the Russian Embassy in Washington where the Russian Ambassador accepted them, agreeing to deliver them to his leaders at home...
...Will I have children...
...Above it all sits "The Thinker,' contemplating the struggle and sadness of all humanity, the strength and the weakness, the strivings and the stumblings...
...It is to those pre-digested, least-common-denominator treatments what War and Peace is to Hogan's Heroes...
...At the end of each teacher training workshop, the Facing History Project staff asks teachers if they need help with any controversial material...
...It is overwhelming to me, as it must be to you, that every human being on this planet must live each day to its fullest, because the next day may never come...
...In the last five months, we have received more than 500 requests for our new curriculum," said Bobbie Snow, coordinator of the nuclear unit...
...Many letters, Lewis observes, contain poignant pleas for a future, a non-nuclear future...
...The curriculum is divided into frameworks for decision making (politics, ethics and technology), the physics and effects of nuclear weapons, case studies of political decisions (Hiroshima, the Cuban missile crisis, the Israeli attack on the Iraqi nuclear reactor) and personal empowerment...
...Teaching about the issues of nuclear disarmament, helping our students develop their own framework for decision making in the nuclear age, will not only help our students but will enhance the schools as an important social institution...
...We'd get hurt too...
...What is decision making in an ethical framework...
...Each student 's*message, translated into Russian, is placed in a large album along with a personal photograph...
...teaching and testing the new materials began last fall...
...Their enthusiasm was both effective and infectious, and Strom and Parsons went on to become co-directors of a remarkable program whose materials include historical accounts, eyewitness testimony, plans for student writing and discussion, and bibliographies...
...The Project staff and writers were able to respond quickly to the urgency felt by the teachers...
...They have rich imaginations and a real drive to solve problems...
...Elizabeth Lewis, one of the principal writers of the curriculum, thinks that the first unit is the strongest because it gives students frameworks for beginning to think about nuclear issues in larger terms...
...I have two cats which I share with my brother and my hobbies are horse riding, reading, stamp collecting and rock collecting...
...We just stopped thinking.' That is what we refuse to let happen—again...
...However, I cannot speak for these people, nor can I speak for you...
...Teachers, too, agonize over the issues and what is at stake...
...I have become enthusiastic about doing something about it...
...I hope that as you are reading this letter, you will try to do the same for me—see me as a person, not a country or an event...
...But most of all, we must learn to think about thinking...
...Teachers use these concerns to move the curriculum from despair to empowerment...
...T want to be a priest or an athlete when I grow up...
...Inquiries should be addressed to: Facing History and Ourselves, 25 Kennard Road, Brookline, MA 02146 (617)734-1111, Ext...
...My future is scarce because of this situation...
...These are very real issues for our students and for us...
...Last October, the Project began the nuclear program as a pilot in three schools...
...Student volunteers come in every day just to cut out articles from newspapers and magazines...
...The many activities of the Facing History Project emanate from a beehive office on the top floor of the Lincoln School in Brookline...
...But by dealing openly with the profoundly important issues, the realities raised by the Holocaust, we can become stronger...
...Laufer, who fled from Germany in 1934, used the chance to press on Sperber his idea that the history of the Holocaust should be included in the high school curriculum...
...Israel to begin...
...Nuclear war is very scary...
...But there are plenty of good ones too...
...Students want to know when citizens can make a stand...
...Just as the national debate on the use and abuse of nuclear weapons has been dramatically joined, a new public school curriculum—"Decision Making in a Nuclear Age"—has made its debut...
...Will I marry...
...And I find that almost everything I read in the papers or see on TV relates somehow to what we're teaching...
...I'm not a nuclear physicist, not a big shot politician...
...Margot Strom, a smartly dressed woman in her 30s, reviews how the Facing History Project has galvanized her own life...
...The prior examination in class of propaganda techniques which dehumanize Soviet citizens prepares the students to try to get across the truth about themselves and their small chunk of American society...
...I live in Brookline, Massachusetts with my parents and younger brother...
...They talk with classes about taking responsibility, making moral decisions, taking risks, standing up for what is right...
...In this course, we believe the teachers and students will be learners together...
...In our work, we keep returning to a question raised by Hannah Arendt...
...Paper is everywhere...
...Back in the '60s I read a book about the children of the Nazis asking their parents about what had happened...
...I am 12 years old and I'm sure some people think that my ideas are too big for my age...
...Requests for copies of the curriculum and information about the program continue to mount...
...The unit asks such questions as: "What criteria are useful and appropriate for judging technology...
...A class, without telling the teacher, went together to the school bathroom and erased the word nigger that had been there for years...
...One practical activity is letter-writing to Russian leaders...
...Another girl told me after recess, 'This course makes me so mad...
...I am not afraid any more to talk about nuclear things...
...I saw the massive 'Gates of Hell' which Rodin conceived after reading Dante's Inferno...
...Planning and development began more than two years ago...
...Then, just one month later, 35 out of 35 teachers at one workshop said they wanted training and materials about nuclear issues...
...After the discussion of frameworks for judging technology, he said, "I guess nuking them isn't really the answer...
...While I was there, I went to the Rodin exhibition at the National Gallery of Art...
...After all, a new curriculum is usually met with considerable resistance, and years must pass before it gains widespread acceptance, even if the issues with which it deals are considered urgent...
...The children said, 'What prevented you from stopping Hitler?' They had no answer...
...I'm a teacher and so I must do what I can in a field in which I'm trained and can have some influence...
...But Strom and Parsons have considerable credibility among their colleagues all over the United States, credibility born of their development, over the last six years, of a curriculum entitled "Holocaust and Human Behavior...
...Sperber recalls that after organizing a series of three conferences at Boston-area colleges on topics related to the Holocaust, two of his junior high school teachers (Strom and Parsons) led a drive to secure funds and to develop studies for a new curriculum, one that viewed as very much alive the issues raised by the awful reality of the Holocaust...
...Students are asked to be tolerant of many perspectives...
...After a summer workshop on the subject, we wondered why the Holocaust was such a taboo subject in schools...
...One boy, initially hostile about the Holocaust curriculum, after several months quietly erased the swastika from his math book...
...I was a Jew in a predominantly Jewish one...
...The teacher replied, "I guess because I have to...
Vol. 7 • May 1982 • No. 5
