Remembering is not enough: rethinking Holocaust education through debating with evil

According to "The Antisemitism Report for 2021", published by the World Zionist Organization and the Jewish Agency, anti-Semitism in the Western world was more evident in 2021 than it had been for ten years1. Given this data, we believe that the rich tradition of Holocaust education urgently requires a reexamination of educational goals and teaching strategies. This article analyzes the impact of a workshop inspired by Socratic Disputation in Holocaust education at the high school level. We conceived the workshop as a dialogical confrontation in which the teacher defends the position of Nazi criminals, justifying their actions through the arguments that were popular at the time. Therefore, the research question are: Did student ideas about the causes of Nazi discrimination and extermination change as a result of participating in the workshop? In what way? This qualitative study is located within the ecological paradigm and phenomenological epistemology (Denzin & Lincoln, 2011). Two hundred students from a private high school in the province of Milan (Monza, Italy) participated in the workshop. We administered two questionnaires, one before and one after the workshop and we conducted 12 in-depth semi-structured interviews in order to collect data on student views about the topic and the instructional method. The data collected were analyzed using an inductive, bottom-up approach, following the criteria of reflective thematic analysis as codified by Braun & Clarke (2019). The results show several elements of interest regarding the effectiveness of the instructional strategy examined in promoting conceptual change.