Posted on 07/07/2019 4:07:40 AM PDT by Kaslin
There are some things that are just not up for debate. These aren’t political issues. What happened in Florida didn’t center on MAGA hats, flag burning, or the merits of tax cuts. We actually had a high school principal question whether the Holocaust was a “historical, factual” event. The Palm Beach Post has the story. A mother of a student tried for a year to reason with the school administration to, you know, actually teach kids about this terrible period in human history without the nonsense. She wondered how this was being taught at the school. The emails between the parent and Spanish River High School Principal William Latson were released and, well, it was not very good. Latson has since apologized for the wording in these emails, with the school district’s deputy schools superintendent saying that Latson was “counseled” on the exchanges, but not formally reprimanded. Now, Latson is not a Holocaust denier, but this nonsensical two sides position he took about this issue is a bit disturbing. There is no ‘two sides argument’ concerning the Holocaust (via Palm Beach Post):
A mother pushed for a year to address what she described as a school leader’s failure to separate truth from myth.
She sent off the email with few expectations — a routine question seeking a routine answer. How, the mother wondered, was the Holocaust being taught at Spanish River High School?
She wanted to make sure, she wrote to the principal, that her child’s school was making Holocaust education “a priority.” The response she received five days later, in April 2018, was anything but routine.
In an email reply, Principal William Latson assured her that the school had “a variety of activities” for Holocaust education.
But he explained that the lessons are “not forced upon individuals as we all have the same rights but not all the same beliefs.”
The mother, who asked not to be named to protect her child’s identity, was stunned. Was the principal of one of Palm Beach County’s largest public schools suggesting that the Holocaust was a belief rather than an actual event?
Thinking Latson simply had expressed himself poorly, she wrote back, asking him to clarify his comments. “The Holocaust is a factual, historical event,” she wrote. “It is not a right or a belief.”
She expected a chastened response. Instead, the veteran principal doubled down.
“Not everyone believes the Holocaust happened,” he wrote, according to email records obtained by The Palm Beach Post through a public records request. “And you have your thoughts, but we are a public school and not all of our parents have the same beliefs.”
He went on to say that as an educator he had “the role to be politically neutral but support all groups in the school.”
“I can’t say the Holocaust is a factual, historical event because I am not in a position to do so as a school district employee,” Latson wrote.
[…]
She didn’t doubt that Latson knew the Holocaust was real, she said in an interview, but she feared his reluctance to say so stemmed from a desire to avoid confronting parents who deny the Holocaust’s reality.
The publication adds that the other pushed for the mandatory reading of Elie Wiesel’s “Night “ for sophomores, along with assemblies on the Holocaust. The first suggestion was honored, but the assemblies were not held due to “time constraints.”
Maybe this is an unforced error. No, it was. Who cares about catering to the “holocaust denier” crowd? The point of an educator is that you don’t even dabble or give the myth-peddling crowd any platform or the light of day for that matter, especially on issues like the Holocaust. This is a ‘Florida man’ story for sure, those often humorous and often insane local stories from the Sunshine State, but this one takes a very dark turn indeed.
Thank you! We must challenge the notion that we are a Democracy at every opportunity.
No mob ever created anything.
I found this little gem re-watching this John Wayne movie on Western movie night.
[“Not everyone believes the Holocaust happened,” he wrote...]
More like some (cough...allahu...cough...akbar!) people don’t think it’s finished yet.
Fact: there are two genders - male and female - easily proved from multiple directions.
Public schools teach there are five more genders - L,G,B,T,Q - based merely on statement, declaration or whim.
School boards control teaching personnel and curricula - let’s get conservatives on the school boards and take back control.
Looking at the source article it appears affirmative action has again reared its ugly head
I asked the same question of my dad as a kid after we
saw a Holocaust exhibit, what about all the others
rounded up and killed?
He said because Jews were singled out above all
others; it is easy to see in proportion to their population it was
more than a decimation (literally, 1 in 10) but an attempted
extermination
Possibly the principal is working from talking points or such to use when queried by parents. It sure sounds like some constituent group or administrative authority is being pandered to with answers like that.
It is actually The Shoah.
I get your point.
All you mention were certainly “holocausts,” but over the years “the Holocaust” has, for better or worse, come to refer to what the Nazis perpetrated before and during WW2.
BTW, for my historiography class in college, I wrote my main paper on the Armenian genocide. It was three months of intense research of primary and secondary sources. When I finally came up for air and composed the paper it took a long while before I could really digest it all. It was brutal.
And yet, to this day, the Turks deny it happened.
“Not everyone believes there was slavery in the US...”
Where are the monuments or memorials? One would think if something that bad actually happened there would be something to memorialize it, therefore it never happened. A statue at least, or something. Its all a lie.
Yet as an educator it would be reprehensible not to teach the student the facts, fringe opinions notwithstanding.
Unlike most instances of idiocy by public school administrators, this one has some nuance.
On one side, it is slightly refreshing to see a public school administrator state that the schools need to remain politically neutral.
On the other side, it is sad that the actions of a totalitarian national socialist regime in Germany 75 years ago could be considered matters of politics and not historical fact.
The Holocaust is certainly a sad fact of history and should be taught as historical fact, but I’m unsure whether it ought to be a ‘central’ part of the curriculum. Most states require a yearlong course in US history. Any course on US History should include one or two weeks on World War II. And any discussion of World War II needs to include the Holocaust. Two or three class periods for every high school junior might be the minimum exposure that every educated citizen should have.
Whether there should be additional coverage of the Holocaust through reading “Night” or “The Diary of Anne Frank” in English Literature classes should be a local decision. So should a school assembly, which seems a little much to me. However, an assembly on the topic of the Holocaust might be appropriate in a school district with a significant Jewish population.
I do believe that the local community should largely control the public school curriculum, so I’m glad that this mom is offering her input to the school principal. I’m not certain that this case is so outrageous that it requires national attention, but I hope there is a vigorous debate at the local school board.
Ironically, Spielberg, who’s work to document stories of survivors to preserve the existence of evil, also did work that can sway the little minded that it could be faked... schindler’s List.
The Japanese deny the Rape Of Nanking to this very day.
I’m not trying to denigrate any groups victimized by genocide. Let’s recognize them all.
The trouble with the ignorant in positions of power is that they invent fantasy worlds and force others to live in them.
No. He's real. I saw him on Star Trek.
That was a chief objective of the Nuremberg trials. To document what happened. There’s literally tons of evidence stored in The Hague, Netherlands that substantiate the holocaust. And some continue to deny.
This is the result of post modernism. Literary and historical deconstruction where there is no objective truth, no objective fact, only competing narratives.
Isn't that why we have education? To teach what really happened and to find the truth?
There is no need to call all acts of atrocity that kill millions of people the same name.
Most of the people that died under Stalin starved and most emerged from the Gulags alive. The Holocaust was an attempt to brutally eliminate an entire group of people with torture and experimentation, systematically. It stands at the pinnacle of man’s inhumanity to man in scope & breadth.
Referring to the other instances as holocausts is correct but the Death Camps were a whole ‘nother level. Right now in Africa smaller scale holocausts are occurring. Brutal, animalistic though they are, abhorent, repellent, they too did not have gas ovens, picking through human remain for gold teeth, lampshades of skin, human bodies stacked like cord wood, or Mengele and his tortures...
I find it odd to want to argue over which unspeakable crime against humanity is worse and to want to claim parity== rather than mourning and attempting to learn from each but if parse we must, those are my thoughts.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2011/03/10/hitler-vs-stalin-who-killed-more/
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