Teaching the Past

[mshea]

A friend of mine recently posted a link to this article.

The article, from UK newspaper The Daily Mail, is titled Teachers drop the Holocaust to avoid offending Muslims and discusses how some teachers are beginning to remove potentially controversial topics, such as the Holocaust and the Crusades, from their classes in order to avoid potentially

Comments

[sleepweasel]

I hear you - I've confronted that problem (or something like it) several times this year in reference to "the n-word" when teaching texts like Huck Finn or short stories by Flannery O'Connor. It's amazing to me that students would want to avoid texts like this rather than confront them for what they were, which is, I think, slightly different from what they are - and that difference makes them very teachable, valuable moments that shouldn't be avoided - especially by people who might (and should be) offended by them.

Avoiding seems to be the new confrontation.