A bill requiring that Missouri teach its schoolchildren about the Holocaust is moving through the Legislature with strong bipartisan support. Aren’t these lawmakers worried that this topic is too divisive? Or that it will make kids of German ancestry “feel bad about themselves”?
Of course, no one is making those silly arguments against this worthy legislation — yet many of the same lawmakers who support the measure are making exactly those silly arguments in separate bills attempting to ban discussion of racial issues from the classroom.
As the Post-Dispatch’s Grace Zokovitch reports, legislation by Rep. Adam Schwadron, R-St. Charles, would create a “Holocaust Education Week” in Missouri schools to highlight awareness of the German Nazis’ genocidal campaign against European Jews during World War II. Some 6 million Jews were systematically murdered, largely in concentration camps created under Adolf Hitler for that purpose. A national survey in 2020 discovered a disturbing lack of knowledge among Americans today regarding those and other details of one of the worst crimes against humanity ever committed.
