NY Teacher Asks Students to Write About How Jews Caused Nazi Germany
As unbelievable as this sounds, it actually happened recently in Albany, New York.
It was a writing assignment in an English class.
Chris Carola of the Times Union broke the story.
NY district mulls action for Nazi assignment
ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) — A high school English teacher faces disciplinary action for giving a writing assignment that asked students to make a persuasive argument blaming Jews for the problems of Nazi Germany, Albany school district officials said Friday.
Superintendent Marguerite Vanden Wyngaard said administrators were discussing what official action the unidentified 10th-grade teacher at Albany High School will face for the assignment given to students on Monday. It could range from a letter of counsel to dismissal.
The assignment, first reported Friday by the Albany Times Union, asked students to research Nazi propaganda, then assume their teacher was a Nazi government official who had to be convinced of their loyalty. The assignment told students they “must argue that Jews are evil.”
“This assignment for some of our students at Albany High School was completely unacceptable. It displayed a level of insensitivity that we absolutely will not tolerate in our school community,” Wyngaard said at a news conference Friday at the United Jewish Federation. “I’m deeply apologetic to all of our students, all of our families and the entire community.”
Wyngaard spoke in a room full of books on the Holocaust and was flanked by school board officials and representatives of Jewish organizations. Speakers said the Anti-Defamation League will run sensitivity programs at the school for staff and students.
Comments
Totalitarian states must have scapegoats. Jews,Kulaks…….Conservatives?
First off, the headline of this article is blatantly inaccurate. The assignment was to write on how the Jews were responsible for the problems of Nazi Germany, not on how the “Jews caused Nazi Germany” (i.e., were responsible for Nazi Germany itself). I will not speculate on the cause of the inaccuracy, but I will stress that the author should be more careful with his words in the future.
Second…what’s the problem here? The assignment was for the students to pretend that their teacher was a Nazi official, whom they had to convince of their loyalty. There is a potentially valuable lesson in propaganda to be taught there — about how people who are motivated by sufficient fear (or hatred) can twist truth into untruth. Do we not want our students to constantly be on the lookout for people with an agenda and a way with words?
Now, the teacher did make one huge mistake. This is the sort of thing that anyone ought to know would be a flashpoint issue, and the parents really needed to be informed of the teacher’s plans — and have their approval sought — beforehand. If the parents had it explained to them that the purpose of this assignment was to learn about propaganda, rather than to promote Nazi ideology and to scapegoat Jews for their own perseuction, they might have approved its use.