Teaching genocide
One school board gets a lesson in definitions
BY Melita Kuburas
When the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) decided to add a Grade 11 course on genocide to its curriculum, its intention was to educate students about the violent realities faced through history by cultures around the world. But so far it’s the TDSB that’s been receiving the lesson on the sensitivities that surround the term “genocide.”
Set to launch this fall in 11 Toronto schools, the optional “Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity” credit centres on three case studies—the Holocaust, Armenia and Rwanda. Its goal is to examine causes and consequences of genocide while fostering empathy among students. But despite this noble purpose, the learning material has proved controversial.
Created through a collaboration involving TDSB staff, external academics and an outside Holocaust education program, the course was officially approved in August 2007. The TDSB posted the outline for the course online, and complaints and requests for changes began to pour in. By the time the window for requests closed at the end of January, 27 groups had contacted the TDSB with complaints.
These complaints centred on two primary critiques: objection at inclusion in the course material and objection at exclusion. Turkish groups didn’t want the “genocide” label applied to the mass killing of Armenians by the Turkish government in 1915, while the League of Ukrainian Canadians (LUC) wanted to see more time devoted to the 1932 Ukrainian Famine, or Holodomor, during which the Soviet government engineered mass starvation of peasant farmers. “All of us want some sort of acknowledgement, some sort of recognition, especially if we have gone through a period of such suffering,” says Orest Steciw, Holodomor projects coordinator for the LUC.
The amount of criticism the course received came as a surprise to the TDSB, says Nadine Segal, system superintendent for special programs. In response, she explains, a review committee was established to examine the complaints.
Out of this review came one major recommendation—the addition of “crimes against humanity” to the course title, which the TDSB accepted to highlight the fact that some cases of war crimes took more lives than recognized cases of genocide.
Explains Darryl Robinson, professor of law at Queen’s University and a member of the review committee, “This whole fixation on genocide, it’s probably the wrong fixation in the first place, and we should be focused instead on crimes against humanity.”
But that and other changes—such as the commitment to re-examine course content after three years—have not satisfied critics who take umbrage with the fact that equal lesson time isn’t given to all case studies. The course is “creating a hierarchy of human suffering,” by focusing on only three case studies, says James Kafieh, executive secretary of Canadians for Genocide Education.
Segal defends this approach, arguing that three examples had to be chosen as a focus to provide students with the complex lens by which to analyze other cases.
Despite the criticism, the TDSB believes the course is a worthwhile project. It has already been contacted by school boards across Canada looking to develop their own courses on genocide and crimes against humanity.
