If anything, this experiment only trivializes what was done to the Jews, and at the expense of some poor 8th-graders. Cripes.
[Apopka, Fla.] Local 6 News reported that eighth-graders with last names beginning with L through Z at Apopka Memorial Middle School were given yellow five-pointed stars for Holocaust Remembrance Day. Other students were privileged, the report said.
Father John Tinnelly said his son was forced to stand in the back of the classroom and not allowed to sit because he was wearing the yellow star.
“He was forced to go to the back of the lunch line four times by an administrator,” Tinnely said.
“They were told that they could not use the water fountains,” Tinnely said. “There was even a sign supposedly at one water fountain (saying) if you’re wearing a yellow star , you can’t use this water fountain.”
“Children were selected to be persecuted or privileged, some not told the rule,” [Local 6 reporter Gerald] Reznick said. “Parents tell Local 6 they were not told prior to the school-wide experiment.”
“Teachers felt that it would have defeated the purpose to tell the students ahead of time because that would have prepared them,” Principal Douglas Guthrie said.
Somebody should fire this guy. Oh wait, his name starts with a “G.” Maybe he gets a bowl of ice cream instead. What a creep.
I’d really lke to know how the students felt about this experience. You hve to pay some emotion to learn about emotional issues.
Maybe this was a good exercise.
– PrBl
All this while Fla is 39 of 50 in national middle school rankings.
Yay for modern liberalism in public education!
Fire this guy for what? For showing in a very very small way what intolerance and bigotry can mean to someone? No, it’s better to just say “yeah, it was bad for them, though I suppose you’ll never understand what it was like, or even imagine what it was like”.
I have a feeling these kids won’t be laughing at the concentration camp scenes in Schindler’s List like another class did some years ago. Source: (high school students in Oakland, California laugh at portrayal of Nazi violence toward Jews in ‘Schindler’s List’) (Column) New York Times v143, sec4 (Sun, Feb 6, 1994):E17(N), E17(L), col 5
No, we get the “my little Johnny was made to stand in the back of the class”. FIRE THE PRINCIPLE!
Is that how it works PrBl? In order to get kids to buy into your pet causes, you have to humiliate them first?
You know, I can very easily be against the practice of slavery without having actually been a slave.
Firing the guy seems ridiculous to me. Honestly, this wasn’t the worst idea in the world, it was just very poorly executed. (Although admittedly, comparison to the Holicost is ridiculous. It’s more akin to prejudice in general.) We really do want our children to understand prejudice. This just may not be the way to achieve that.
Did anyone get gased? Any of the children come up missing? I didn’t think so.
It seems people want to put realism into teaching of the Holocaust, if not, other things. You can’t even come close whether it is the Holocaust, War, Slavery, or even being at the Beatles concert in Shea Stadium back in the 60s. You can’t make them feel the environment around these events whether it is during, after, and (before or) leading up to anyone of these events.
What they did teach the kids was how to control a society not how bad the Holocaust was.
Wow…Mike…I dunno if it is OK to class this one as someone’s “pet cause”…I’d pretty much say the Holocaust ranks in the top of things we probably should be trying to fully illustrate to people…and, while I think someone might need to check what possible damage can be done to a middle-schooler, I am not sure it is such a horrible thing to demonstrate something horrible in a relatively safe, yet strong, way. In the end, Johnny gets to have a drink from the fountain again…some people never did. I bet if he really started to dehydrate, they’d have given him bottled springwater too. Making him uneasy for a while isn’t bad, it’s exercise.
I teach grade 8 U.S. History. This kind of stuff is B.S. The notion that simulating such things is a valuable experience necessary for true understanding is ridiculous. I recall one school making it to the headlines after a social studies teacher decided they would simulate the middle passage of the slave trade through a simulation in which students’ hands were bound, and they were made to get down on the floor in rows. ( http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/721509/posts )
Thank God I have never been asked by administration to engage in such silly educational parlour tricks.
What ever happened to good old fashion primary source readings and discussion? I guess it just isn’t “fun” for kids, so it is reserved for A.P. history courses only.
That someone would simulate Nazi policies as a teaching tool is unbelievable. You want grade 8 kids to know how horrible the Holocaust was? Show Night and Fog and be done with it.
Sheesh!
I will have to defer to someone who teaches the stuff. But, I have plenty of memories about things like “pioneer times” and the like when we simulated things to get a feel for how different they were. Admittedly, those things involved standing to speak in class or sitting in the corner with a dunce cap…but, in the end, the memories I had were quite different and, for me, more rich in understanding. Likewise, while also distinct, every simulation we did stuck with me more. I learned much more about political and social issues (and people) when we ran a “country” with resources and decisions to make and all of that than I did reading about other people years and years ago really doing it. It just stuck. Maybe it is not so far from (excuse the quote, it dates me) the guy who said, “you can’t get the sound from reading in a magazine”…so true.
What the school did looks almost exactly like an exercise we do for diversity training at work.
To make the other half understand now, that former “privilaged” students should now have to wear the yellow star. That way none can say it wasn’t fair. Equal oportnity here.
No Rick, the problem is that instead of engaging in a classroom debate based on logic and reason, this school resorted to using humiliation and shame as a teaching tool. This seems to be a common technique for many causes these days… especially from those who lack the ability to form a sound argument (PETA comes to mind).
As I said, you don’t have to have empathy from personal experience in order to appreciate the significance of something.
I hope the FL taxpayers feel they’ve gotted their money’s worth from this little stunt.
I don’t really feel sorry for those “yellow star” kids. If they had released their grip on the school’s banking system none of it would have happened!
My school did a similar thing back in the early Eighties, only it was about Apartid. Everyone in our grade was classified by eye color, (Green, Blue & Grey, Brown) then the color classes where randomly select to be the ruling class with all privleges (Whites), a middle class with limited privileges (the role Asians and Indians occupied in SA), and the lower class (Blacks). There were restrictions on what bathrooms we could use, water fountains, etc. Upperclassmen played referees.
My classmates and I were remarkably apathetic, even for 9th graders. In the end we were told we could “protest” the society, but in doing so we would receive a failing grade for the class. No one stood up, not out of fear of retribution, but because we didn’t care.
Sad, really.
Rick,
You are correct. Simulation does have a place in social studies teaching. However, the Holocaust is a recent enough event that tangible sources of information exist that make point enough that what happened was a terrible, terrible thing. What is ridiculous is not that simulation would be used in the classroom, rather that educators believed that simulation was the best way to get students to empathize with the victims of the Holocaust.
Based on my experiences with 13 year old kids, the large majority of them are not so dull that they must be first treated like a victim of descrimination in order to empathize with a person who is (or was) actually victimized.
The media has etched in our minds only one holocaust. There have been many others. The American Indian Holocaust and the Black African Holocaust just to name two that hit home in America. Jewish PR has been more reaching because there is more power in their voice because there is more money and more influence. This is not to diminish the Jewish Holocaust, but to weigh it in our minds. They have used the word ‘holocaust’ to unjustifiably take land as their state claiming it as retribution for their suffering and their right as written in a 10,000 year-old land deed decreed by the Almighty himself. This action has created turmoil in the Middle East and will lead us into a Third World War that is already in the making.
Yes, let us remember the travesties of war and man’s violence against his own species, man. The Jewish Holocaust is only one of man’s attrocities. If they get a State, let us give one to the Palestinians too. And, while we’re at it, let’s give away the State of Georgia to Blacks as their sovereign state and give Arizona to Indians as their sovereign state. Anyone who lives there now must leave and foresake everything they had there.
by the time kids are 13 they’ve had 7 or 8 years of brain dead eduction, coloring maps, and politically correct fodder. They have had a lifetime of school “rules”, administration weird-ness, teacher anger, and harassment by other kids. I hardly see the point of this exercise.
This isn’t teaching. It’s poorly thought out. It is uninspired. It is trying to simplify a part of history that is way more complex than “George Washington cut down an apple tree and Ben Franklin flew a kite in a thunderstorm”. Our kids graduate uneducated.
Why do we suppose this is?
It’s amazing sometimes how “educators” can sometimes completly misunderstand a historical event. Although, I shouldn’t be really that surprised as most grade school teachers, while well trained educators, have very scant training in their selected disciplines. No doubt, they felt this was a creative way of “makin’ it real” for their students. However, I don’t see what insight could be gained in this little recreation that couldn’t be gained by having the kids read “Anne Frank” or some other primary source. At the grade school level, it’s actually less important for students to explore specific events and more important about teaching them how historians work. This social experiment does not of that.
I don’t which way to go on this one. I was home schooled until my Senior year. My Mom(who has a PhD in Education) never did things like this but I did see films and video’s of what the Nazi’s did , the KKK did, and other stuff from the past. Then Mom would engage me in discussion of what I saw, how I felt, and if I understood what was happening.
I think this may have been a bit dumb, but if the kids were really engaged after, and got to discuss their true feelings, maybe it had some good effect. I would like to think it did.
I don’t know about firing the guy. It’s not easy to get kids of any age to think for themselves or to look at issues like the Holocaust. The compitition for their attention is really strong, so maybe you have to shake the bottle and hope some of it fizzes to the top.
I see and even agree with Mikes position on engaging them in a logical discussion. I don’t agree that this is a *cause* like Global Warming or that kind of thing.
Our schools now only teach to the tests for the most part, so at least someone tried to get more into the classroom than just that. Thats not always a bad thing.
I think a couple of things are being blurred here. There are surely issues here of this exercise being somehow harmful or bad for the kids, rather, the debate can center on that…and there is a debate about the effectiveness or appropriateness of it. I can’t agree more that the holocaust, pioneer days, and diverity training are dramatically different things, but that point argues both ways. If the holocaust (IF?!?!) is truly enormous compared to ‘pioneer days’ then it is arguable that a dramatic teaching method is justified. I mean, is reading Anne Frank really as an emotional experience to a kid who is skipping chapters to get done with his/her homework? It is absolutely true that reading a book, watching footage or a movie, or even reading a poem can bring incredible insight and understanding…but to every 8th grader? I think the teacher was simply trying to honour the weight of the holocaust and to impart a deeper, emotional connection to what it is that we are trying to teach when we are teaching about the holocaust. I can’t fault the guy for that attempt. If it can be shown somehow a harmful way to do it (no, we should NOT whip children to show them how bad slaves had it) then I will have to say it is not an option…but it seems to me like the harm is nothing compared to the sorts of horrors that middle-schoolers put to each other every day…with teachers looking past it as simply a feature of the kids in question.
David said: “their right as written in a 10,000 year-old land deed decreed by the Almighty himself.”
Uh, David, it’s called the bible. I’ll assume based upon your statment that you are an atheist, cause why would anybody listen to, or respect, a 2000 year old book as well.
The bottom line is that probably every piece of land in the world changed ownership by force. The key is to accept that what happened in the past is past, and to use better judgment in the future. And to stop any new forcible ownership changes. Or at least try.
It doesn’t seem like a bad exercise – but they should have told the kids in advance. The Jews had been persecuted for centuries, especially in Germany and Eastern Europe, so they could see some of it coming. I would have told the kids the day before in preparation, and then throughout the day of the exercise added more and more restrictions – letting them get comfortable and tolerant, and then piling on more restrictions.
Of course, since that is the way liberals (and conservatives) want to build up government power – through incrementalism – perhaps that would not be a good way to indoctrinate children.
This was done to my class in 6th grade it was a very good experiance I never knew you could get in so much touble for it. It wasn’t as extreme as this and it only was for a few hours but it stills sticks with đ
I would like to propose a plan to deal with this and any similar type of… I think the correct technical term would be, stupid shit.
Let’s call the plan “The Andy or Barney System”. How this works is before you do anything, ask yourself, “if I do this, will I appear to be more like Andy or Barney?”
Before you react to anything done by anyone else that seems “Barneylike”, stop and ask yourself, will my reaction be perceived as being more like Andy or Barney?”.
If this seems hard to comprehend, you ARE Barney. And you have to give back your one bullet.
Iâm not sure that going to see emotional movies would help. So much of how someone reacts is tied to their position on the subject. Remember that the Nazis had no problem finding fathers and otherwise good people to do these horrible acts. As screwed up as the actions of the school are reported to be, I think this approach be effective if done differently.
This reminds me of the old addage: if you want to know how it fells to be ‘X’ then take a walk in his/her shoes for a while. There is no substitute for experience and what these kids got was inconveinance at best and perhaps some aquired a small understanding. History speaks volumes: we left Europe for religious persecution and practiced it here with the witch hunts, then the indians, and the african americans. So you’d think that we’d learned our lesson and would never let this happen again…until the Japanese and the Germans in WWII…oh but now we’re better. I hope so, but the reminder of what it was like in such a benign way is probable a good life experience, at least for some.
Our kids graduate uneducated.
Why do we suppose this is?
Because projects like this are forbidden. They go to school and have âsubjectsâ drilled into their heads until they can recite like perfect little robots. THEY ARE NOT ALLOWED TO THINK. Teachers that don’t want to teach this are poor teachers. They might be great robot programmers, but not teachers.
Not once in the article did the Principal claim that this was a simulation of the WWII holocaust. That conclusion was based upon the parents reaction. Well wippee ding dong. Somebody just didn’t learn anything in class today. The boy that went home crying and said âDaddy, I was a Jew todayâ. So the father complains !!! If the boy understood what it would have been like to have been born a Jew and not just have a few privileges taken away… . Maybe if Daddy understood that he holds a high position in society simply because he was born white. Maybe if they weren’t such bigots themselves,…
In my opinion this can go a long way in teaching tolerance and intolerance. Maybe one day just wasn’t long enough for the lesson to sink in. Tomorrow, yes, show them some movies of the concentration camp âinmatesâ standing along the barb wire fence, laying on stretchers, being pushed into a mass grave. All skin, bones, and filth. Explain how these walking dead also had to wear a yellow star.
If you don’t like the idea that this might have been a Jew, substitute an Amerindian in 1880 Montana, Armenian in 1906 Turkey, a black in 1960 Alabama, a Zulu or Indian in 1975 South Africa, a Ukrainian in 1933 USSR, or a black in Darfur today. Every November 11, at exactly 11:00 AM we remember those who fought in wars to defend us from tyranny. âLest We Forgetâ
…oh but now weâre better. I hope so,
Are we really? When a father can complain that his poor baby âwas a Jewâ for a day, we are no better. When we can decide that international laws don’t apply to us just because we said so, we are no better. When we can stand by while a 1 ton bomb is dropped on an apartment building and then blame the occupants, we are no better.
For everyone that thinks the Principal should be fired or think upsetting some poor little students is a bad idea, you are part of the problem. You are what allows tyrannies to happen. You are the empty headed zombies doing the Dictator’s evil work.
We did this in a social studies class when I was in High School using green armbands. Of course, we had the option to participate. Those of us that did it, were second class citizens for a week. We could only use certain bathrooms and water fountains. We weren’t allowed to sit with people that didn’t have green arm bands. The whole school (small school) was in on it. It was a great exercise in understanding how an oppressed minority can feel.
The only thing they did wrong in this case was forcing the kids to do it.
This is very much like what an Iowa schoolteacher did with her class in the late 60s. She divided her class into groups, blue-eyed and brown-eyed…
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/divided/