Public teacher here. I teach US History now, but used to teach World Geography and Cultures to 6th graders and covered the Holocaust. English teachers in the middle schools I have worked in have had the kids read Holocaust novels. Liberal Reading teacher I work with now is covering it in the spring. The last high school I was at (in St. Louis) read a Holocaust novel as well.
My 8th grade students ask to learn about it even though it is not in my curriculum (which ends at Reconstrucion). But I also live the in West Texas and most if the people I work with and teach are different than much of the rest of the country.
Welcome to Free Republic.
What do you consider as west Texas?
My experience, too, as a high school social studies teacher, the Holocaust is very well covered in most high school curricula.
Now, that the kids actually learn anything about it is another matter altogether...
Texas has been different and probably continues to be so then. The films of concentration camps and history lessons in classes were most effective for retention in southeast Texas in the 1960s—especially the films.
I worked as a substitute teacher in a district in a rural area on the Rockies in Colorado during the early 2000s and saw no instruction on the subject. I also had children in that school. Most of the history content in that Colorado district involved Sacagawea, Martin Luther King and similar politically correct topics. Even George Washington was excluded. I stopped working there and home-schooled the children.
Young adults who were students in a couple of states in the Midwest have told me that there was little or no history taught on the matter during the 1990s. They were in their teens. A few in their teens and twenties in one of those states told me more recently, that they also recalled no instruction or media about the Holocaust.