France condemns teacher for educating students about the Holocaust

A history teacher has been suspended in France for spending "too much" class time on teaching the Holocaust. Here’s a classic example of where France goes wrong. A July report condemned Catherine Pederzoli for "lacking distance, neutrality and secularism" and that by spending so much time on the Holocaust she was "brainwashing" her students. For ...

A history teacher has been suspended in France for spending "too much" class time on teaching the Holocaust.

A history teacher has been suspended in France for spending "too much" class time on teaching the Holocaust.

Here’s a classic example of where France goes wrong. A July report condemned Catherine Pederzoli for "lacking distance, neutrality and secularism" and that by spending so much time on the Holocaust she was "brainwashing" her students.

For the past fifteen years, Pederzoli has organized annual trips for students to death camps in Poland and the Czech Republic. The number of students she was allowed to take had been cut in half, prompting her students to hold a protest when French Minister of Education Luc Chatel visited the school. Pederzoli was accused of inciting the protests.

Here’s how ridiculous the report was: 

The ministry’s report cites that in meeting with investigators, the teacher used the word "Holocaust" 14 times while using the more neutral term "massacre" only twice.

Seriously? She’s brainwashing her students because she used an internationally recognized term for the heinous crimes committed against Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, and other "undesirables" by Nazi Germany? It’s hard to imagine a more preposterous condemnation.

France’s republican tradition means that it doesn’t officially recognize differences between demographic groups, and that secularism is the overriding state virtue. But that deliberate non-recognition –"I can’t see you!" — itself leads directly to policies that are often used, intentionally or not, in an anti-Semitic or Islamophobic manner.

Andrew Swift is an editorial researcher at Foreign Policy.

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