06 February 2008
The British government is to fund two students from every school in England to visit the former Nazi death camp Auschwitz to learn about the Holocaust, in a bid to help teach the lessons of the genocide to the younger generation. The sixth-form students, who are typically between 16 and 18 years old, will meet with survivors of the Holocaust, and will be shown the camp's barracks, see inmates' registration documents, and piles of victims' clothes, shoes and hair, according to an announcement earlier this week.
"The Holocaust was one of the most significant events in world history," deputy education minister Jim Knight said. "Six million people died not for what they had done but simply for who they were. What strikes me is the sheer scale of it and how industrialized and mechanized the process of killing people became at Auschwitz. It was not hot-blooded brutality, it happened in a very planned way, with some people designing the process of death and others carrying it out. Every young person should have an understanding of this."
The program is set to last an initial period of three years, and the government said it would contribute two thirds of the estimated costs of US$ 600 per trip. The trips themselves are to last one day, with students leaving early in the morning and arriving home late at night.
Meanwhile, the British secretary of state for children, schools and families Ed Balls has written to foreign embassies and media outlets in the UK to insist that a widely-circulated email that claims that Holocaust education in schools is to be removed from the curriculum was a hoax and entirely without truth. "I want to put an end once and for all to the myth that the Holocaust is not being taught in schools or is being removed from the curriculum," Balls said in his statement, adding: "I am pleased to confirm that this is absolutely not the case. We are clear that there are certain non-negotiable subjects, which are protected in schools; one of those is the Holocaust."
Part of the hoax email reads: "Recently this week, UK removed The Holocaust from its school curriculum because it ‘offended’ the Moslem population, which claims it never occurred."
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