“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
Voltaire (1694-1778)
In my state, New York, the educational gurus and data driven whiz kids at State Ed and outside testing consortiums are redefining public education in a way that is scary. Test, Test, Test. Measurement, accountability, formative assessment, summative assessment, normative assessment, on and on. Goodbye to meaning, depth, compassion, empathy.
How does one measure life changing experiences? The reunions I have organized of Holocaust survivors and their American liberators meeting with thousands of students are now a thing of the past. Now it’s time to focus on the pretests and the post tests. And the tests in between.
God be with you if you as a teacher have the courage to stand up and say no.
German Medical Association Apologizes for Holocaust Horrors
The German Medical Association has apologized for sadistic experiments and other atrocious actions of doctors more than six decades ago under the Nazis.
By Christine Hsu | May 25, 2012
The German Medical Association has apologized for sadistic experiments and other atrocious actions of doctors more than six decades ago under the Nazis.
In the statement adopted on Wednesday at the Bundesärztekammer (German Medical Association) meeting in Nuremberg, the association said that many doctors under the Nazis were “guilty, contrary to their mission to heal, of scores of human rights violations and we ask the forgiveness of their victims, living and deceased, and of their descendants.”
The declaration also says that contrary to popular belief doctors were not ordered by political authorities to kill and to experiment on prisoners, instead the doctors had engaged in the Holocaust as leaders and enthusiastic Nazi supporters.
Besides conducting pseudo-scientific experiments on prisoners in Nazi concentration camps, German doctors played a large role in the Nazi’s program of forced sterilization or euthanasia of the mentally ill or others deemed “unworthy of life.”
The association noted that “outstanding representatives of renowned academic medical and research institutions were involved” in establishing and carrying out the mass execution of millions in the Holocaust.
They said “these crimes were not the actions of individual doctors but involved leading members of the medical community” and should serve as a warning for the future [my emphasis].
OK. About time, I suppose.
Now read the quote below. Israeli educational psychologist Haim Ginott writes about a letter that teachers would receive from their principal each year:
I am a survivor of a concentration camp. My eyes saw what no person should witness: gas chambers built by learned engineers. Children poisoned by educated physicians. Infants killed by trained nurses. Women and babies shot by high school and college graduates.
So, I am suspicious of education.
My request is this: Help your children become human. Your efforts must never produce learned monsters, skilled psychopaths or educated Eichmanns. Reading, writing, and arithmetic are important only if they serve to make our children more human.
Teaching History Matters 