Abstract
All too often, social studies teachers present the cruelty of the Holocaust as an isolated event. These units focus on Hitler, gas chambers, and war crimes and end with a defiant and honorable “Never Again!” While covering mass murder in this way is laudable, it ultimately might not go as far as it could. For as teaches if we really want to empower our students to prevent genocide, we must look beyond the facts alone to the larger lessons these horrific events can teach us. It is with this background in mind that we wrote this chapter; that in order to teach our students to be good, we have the obligation to help them develop their own understandings of where and why society has fallen off the tracks. The idea of a recipe provided us with a way to help students understand the early warning signs of mass murder such that they would be better equipped to prevent them in the future. Doing so would hopefully inspire them not to bystanders to any similar cruelty, both in the world and in their daily lives. After all, Rwandan President Paul Kagame notes, “people can be made to be bad, and they can also taught to be good.”
Recommended Citation
Karb, J., & Beiter, A. (2009). The Holocaust to Darfur: A Recipe for Genocide. Journal of Inquiry and Action in Education, 2 (1). Retrieved from https://digitalcommons.buffalostate.edu/jiae/vol2/iss1/4
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