Education for Democracy

Two artefacts  from prisoners: a dog someone made to cheer up a child and chess pieces carved by a man who was later executed. These are part of museum attached to the Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance. I went there yesterday to speak to the director, Karl Pfeifer. His assistant put me on to a strange story.

Austrian school children are given some mandatory information about the Holocaust, and many are given a concentration camp tour. During some such tours in recent years, students have been disruptive and deprecating, and this has upset the ministries at the highest levels. They have pushed for more investment in Holocaust education, more empathy, more repudiation of neo-Nazi movements, so that such disruptions can't happen again. The name for this kind of action: "education for democracy."

One associate of the Documentation Centre wrote about this phenomenon in a piece titled roughly: "What is Education For? The Holocaust and Right-Wing Extremism in the Schools" (Andreas Peham, in the archive Yearbook from 2010). He asks one of those splendid simple questions on page 45 of this piece, "How can I teach someone who has to obey me to be disobedient?" 

I can't do better than that question. It states the problem of public education here as Alice in Wonderland states the problem of logic, as the parables of Jesus state the problem of love, as Maya Lin's wall states the problem of war.