Students Will Be Learning Hard Lessons of Inhumanity

Standing beneath a large purple banner that declared, “If you live in the future and ignore the past, you have no present,” Bruce Matsui, principal of a Monterey Park intermediate school, was lecturing several dozen students about his ancestors.

He told them how his grandparents farmed on leased land in Stockton because Japanese immigrants were not allowed to buy property, how his uncle’s priceless collection of Samurai swords was confiscated when Japanese-Americans were hurriedly sent to relocation camps during World War II, how his parents were forced to step on a Japanese flag at the Manzanar camp to prove their loyalty to the United States.

“The reason we’re going to be studying these things is that we don’t want ourselves to make the same mistakes over in history,” the principal told his sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders. “You have to stand on guard against having these rights, which are earned, destroyed.”

Matsui was preparing the children for tougher lessons they would learn later this year, such as how Nazi Germany tried to exterminate the Jews, the massacre of a million or more Armenians by Turkey’s Ottoman Empire and America’s enslavement of blacks. He was also preparing them for tougher questions--like what would they have done if they’d been a Nazi, or a Jew, or a concentration camp guard.

Matsui’s students are among a tiny number in California--probably no more than a few thousand--whose formal curriculum includes the subject of human rights and genocide. Few teachers and fewer textbooks have been willing to address these delicate and often unpleasant subjects.

However, under guidelines being prepared by the state Department of Education, California’s school districts will be required this spring to begin adding “human rights, with particular attention to the inhumanity of genocide,” to the regular social studies curriculum of students in grades 7 through 12.

According to a draft of a “model curriculum” prepared by the Department of Education, teachers should not only discuss history’s most obvious human rights violations but also a host of other issues, from the U.S. refusal to relax immigration laws to allow Jews to enter from Europe during the Holocaust to the issue of how public apathy encourages such wrongs.

“It is not enough simply to recognize the human tragedies involved,” reads the preface to the draft of the model curriculum. “Students must also perceive the relationship between the nature of the governmental structure and the condition of human rights.”

In addition, according to the draft proposal, the depiction of human rights education is to become a criterion for selection of textbooks and supplementary materials by the state and school districts.

“Nothing of this extent (in the field of human rights) has been done before,” said Diane Brooks, manager of the Department of Education’s history and social science unit.

The new curriculum proposal, required by a bill passed by the Legislature in 1985, represents yet another attempt to improve the course of study in California’s public schools. Two years ago, the state Board of Education drew national attention for rejecting a set of seventh- and eighth-grade science textbooks for their “watered-down” coverage of evolution and human reproduction and approved purchases only after changes were made. Last year the board said it will reject all math textbooks submitted for use in kindergarten through eighth-grade classrooms because they failed to meet new state guidelines on how math should be taught.

“I think the same sort of thing will happen to social science textbooks because of the new (human rights) standards,” said Jack Weinstein, a staff development specialist at a Northern California high school who also teaches a state-sponsored course that trains teachers to teach students about the Holocaust.

Questions remain about how enthusiastically districts and individual teachers will greet the new requirements and whether some parents will feel queasy about having their children exposed to detailed “decision-making” discussions about history’s most grisly chapters.

It is also not clear how many days or hours of instruction the typical history or social studies teacher will devote to these subjects. Teachers will likely be given considerable latitude.

However, educators such as Weinstein, who believe that schools must shape human relations as well as teaching basic skills, believe that they have secured an important toehold.

The Holocaust is an effective teaching tool not merely as a piece of history but “because of the questions it forces people to ask” about subjects such as obedience, peer pressure, conformity and scapegoating, all of which confront and tempt students regularly, Weinstein said.

“It helps the student to internalize some very important aspects of world history,” added Assemblyman Charles M. Calderon (D-Alhambra), author of the human rights education bill.

Calderon is a former member of the Board of Education of the Montebello Unified School District, which in the last two years has become the state’s most extensive user of a Massachusetts-based Holocaust education program that features many aspects that California schools are being required to adopt.

The program, Facing History and Ourselves, was created 10 years ago by two teachers in a Brookline, Mass., school district, and has steadily grown into a nonprofit organization that now claims 3,800 teachers throughout the United States who use readings, films and lectures by survivors to teach students about the transcendent ethical issues that swirled around the Holocaust.

The goal of Facing History is to make students see the historical bridge between an innocently told racial joke and a campaign of genocide.

To make youngsters grapple with the role of victim, victimizer and bystander, students are first asked to discuss principles such as tolerance, justice and power. They may watch a film that shows a father taking a reluctant son hunting, encouraging the son to shoot a rabbit against the boy’s will.

Later, the students watch history unfold chronologically, from Germany’s devastation after World War I through the Weimar experiment in constitutional democracy through the war against the Jews. One film shows the story of a Nazi soldier who refuses to participate in a firing squad and, as a result, is ordered to line up and die with the other victims.

Jack Bournazian, a veteran of 27 years of teaching who works in a Chula Vista school district in San Diego County, said he began using the Facing History program because of problems between students in his racially mixed middle school.

“When they see this one person being attacked, and we ask them, ‘What would you do?’ it forces them into this role-playing game: What do you think of this nice, neutral person who doesn’t abuse anyone? And then we find out that he was abetting the villain,” Bournazian said.

“Some of my tough guys, they can see right and wrong, they didn’t like the bullies that they read about. I don’t want to make a magic story of this, but they did see it. They didn’t like it when someone calls them a storm trooper.

“As a lover of history,” Bournazian said, “I feel that if we don’t reach the youngsters, if we don’t correct this (prejudice) now, we’re going to get some hardened attitudes later on.”

About 1,500 California students in five school districts--1,000 of them in the Montebello district and 265 in Bournazian’s district--will be exposed this year to instruction by teachers who have been trained in the Facing History program.

Despite enthusiastic support for the program from Montebello administrators and principals such as Matsui, only 45 of the district’s 1,000 teachers have volunteered for the training.

“It’s a real touchy subject, and some people don’t like to fool with it,” said Joyce Lazerri of the U.S. Department of Education’s National Diffusion Network, which certifies educational training programs.

Even educators supportive of programs like Facing History acknowledge that most public schoolteachers already feel burdened by existing curriculum requirements and an increased emphasis on basic skills and believe that they do not have time to further supplement their lessons. Other teachers have doubts about whether children can handle even the generalized horror of genocide. Still others believe that the Holocaust is a subject that has already received sufficient public exposure.

“You get people saying, ‘I’m sick of the Holocaust. A lot of other people died (in World War II), and all you hear about is Jews because of their clout,’ ” said Bournazian, who is of Armenian descent. “But this is not just about Jews or Armenians. You can change the names and see it throughout history.”

Critics of history textbooks say they have all but ignored the Holocaust and human rights. The average book covers the Holocaust in two paragraphs, said Dr. Edwin Fenton, who runs a teaching center at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh and created a national social studies curriculum center there.

Educators say this void is created partly because textbook companies attempt to cram so many details that few subjects receive in-depth attention and partly because of the controversial nature of the subjects.

“Publishers are looking at a national market, and they think they can’t afford to have a given district reject their series,” said Glen Thomas, director of the state Department of Education’s office of curriculum framework and textbook development. “Unfortunately, over time this (reluctance) has snowballed.”

John Sanford, director of curriculum of a Northern California high school district and a former member of the state Curriculum Commission, said most teachers are unprepared to engage in meaningful human rights education.

Sixty percent of all teachers, Sanford estimated, do not engage students in “decision-making” encounters, such as those used in the Facing History program, and 80% of all social studies teachers use the textbook as their chief instructional tool.

Crucial to the success of the new state curriculum plan, Sanford said, will be how much training the school districts provide to teachers.

“The evidence is that if you don’t have 15 hours or more (of training), you’re not going to change what’s taught,” he said. (Teachers who use the Facing History program undergo four days of workshops.) “People don’t like to shift from what they did in the past. . . . The teacher’s file drawers decide what gets taught.”

Changing what a teacher does in the classroom, Sanford added, “is like changing something in a major religion. Communication is difficult. A teacher, once he’s in the classroom, is isolated. You have to pull him out of the classroom and put him somewhere where he feels the need” for supplementing his lesson plan.