Facing Today reflects Facing History and Ourselves’ primary goal: to honor history in the particular and allow for universal connections that are timely and relevant. Its framework of history and ethics guides our search for current websites, articles, films, and blogs that reflect universal themes such as identity, membership, historical legacy, and civic participation. These themes are represented in Facing History and Ourselves’ primary resource book, “Facing History and Ourselves: Holocaust and Human Behavior,” and in our organization’s Scope and Sequence—a journey of discovery about connections between history and today. Each Facing Today post is linked to related Facing History materials, including study guides, videos, and lessons. As educators it is our challenge to help students make the essential connections between history and the world today without encouraging facile comparisons or simple parallels between the past and the present.
Revealing the Young Bureaucrats Behind the Nazi Terror
Facing History and Ourselves’ core resource book “Facing History and Ourselves: Holocaust and Human Behavior” examines the rise of the Nazis and the Holocaust with a focus on the moral and ethical questions behind people’s choices.
On Thursday, May 6, the new Topography of Terror museum opened in Berlin “at the site of the former Gestapo and SS headquarters,” Der Spiegel writes. The museum, “designed to highlight the role of the perpetrators, those managers and bureaucrats who from their Berlin offices administered mass murder across Europe,” displays index cards with the details of some of the 7,000 former employees of the SS paramilitary group members and Gestapo secret police force—employees who “worked at the very epicenter of the Nazi terror regime.” Der Spiegel notes that the employees at this “most historically contaminated place in Berlin”—the “headquarters for the Third Reich’s brutal repression”—were not what we think of today as stereotypical Nazi war criminals. The employees were “ambitious university-educated men, aged around 30 and more likely to be ideologues than technocrats,” working their way up the career ladder. After the war, most of them “simply faded away into the background.” Just 16 of the 7,000 “former employees of this terror headquarters” faced prosecution, and of the 16, only 3 were eventually convicted.
Facing Today
Facing Today helps educators connect the study of history to issues in our world today. We select current websites, articles, films and blogs that reflect universal themes, such as identity, membership and participation, represented in our scope and sequence. Each media resource is linked to related Facing History materials, including study guides, videos and lessons.
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May 20, 2010
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May 6, 2010
A common Facing History and Ourselves theme is that of bystanders. A bystander is a person or a group of people who see unacceptable behavior but do nothing to stop it.
A recent Boston Globe Magazine article by Neil Swidey titled “The Secret to Stopping a Bully?” offers a possible solution to reducing bullying in U.S. schools. Swidey explains that “none of the current anti-bullying programs . . . have been successful in reducing actual bullying among American students in any meaningful way.” In fact, University of Oregon researchers led by Kenneth Merrell “conducted a meta-analysis—a review statistically combining the results of many earlier studies—that examined the effectiveness of bullying intervention programs in the United States and Europe across a 25-year period.” Merrell and his researchers found that while “some programs produced modest improvements in students’ attitudes about bullying and in their feelings of social competence,” none of the programs “demonstrated a significant reduction in bullying behavior,” and “ ‘the average teacher actually reported more bullying after intervention than before.’ ” Swidey notes that one strategy gaining support involves bystander training: “the thinking is that we can reduce bullying by encouraging uninvolved students to step in to protest when they see [bullying] happening.” While bystander intervention might help reduce bullying, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign professor of educational psychology Dorothy Espelage points out that data suggests “ ‘adolescents rarely intervene to assist victims.’ ” Swidey thus concludes that “the real goal must be to boost those willingness-to-intervene levels among students.” But Swidey’s approach doesn’t target all bystanders. Instead, he believes that “following the premise that the more targeted the approach, the better, it stands to reason that converting the kids closest to the bully would have the biggest effect.” -
April 29, 2010
The New York Times reports that on Friday, April 23, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer signed into law “the nation’s toughest bill on illegal immigration,” formally titled the “Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act.” The law “would make the failure to carry immigration documents a crime and give the police broad power to detain anyone suspected of being in the country illegally.” Before this law, CNN explains, “officers could check someone’s immigration status only if that person was suspected in another crime.” Governor Brewer emphasized in her statement that “ ‘my signature today represents my steadfast support for enforcing the law—both AGAINST illegal immigration AND against racial profiling. . . . I will NOT tolerate racial discrimination or racial profiling in Arizona.’ ” Opponents are not convinced. Alessandra Soler Meetze, director of the American Civil Liberties Union in Arizona, is quoted by the New York Daily News as saying that “ ‘this is a mandate to harass anyone who looks or sounds foreign.’ ” And though it is rare for presidents to “weigh in” on state legislation, Obama responded to the Arizona law, stating that it “threatened ‘to undermine basic notions of fairness that we cherish as Americans, as well as the trust between police and our communities that is so crucial to keeping us safe,’ ” the New York Times writes.
