History is the worst enemy of political correctness. And since a great deal of British multiculturalism is founded on a paranoia of giving offence to ‘other’ communities, history lessons are proving to be a bit of a problem in some British schools. Many of them are choosing not to discuss the Holocaust and the Crusades as part of the non-compulsory section of the national curriculum. Teachers find it too challenging to teach these topics without offending Muslim students and their parents. It is assumed that many of these students are given “highly contentious or charged” versions of these events in their homes or places of worship which do not conform to established standards of historical accuracy. This has emerged from a report significantly entitled Teaching Emotive and Controversial History. The government, on the other hand, is probably going to make the teaching of the Holocaust a compulsory element in the national curriculum from next year. Either way, the Holocaust becomes a peg from which to hang a whole range of moral or ideological concerns rather than a complex historical event to be studied as such.

If respecting democratic freedom and cultural diversity means chickening out of countering the irrationality of anti-semitism with historical truth, then something rather dangerous is beginning to happen in Britain. Conversely, singling out the Holocaust as a historical event that all students must study because it affords indispensable moral lessons also amounts to a rather disproportionate view of history. The proper corrective to either form of pedagogic excess ought to be a mix of being committed to historical truth and a balanced, comprehensive view of history. Political correctness is inimical to both. Religious and cultural difference in contemporary Western societies have to grapple most problematically not so much with the Holocaust as with what follows, or follows from, that chapter in history: the conflict in west Asia and the notions of ‘terror’ that emanate from this conflict. The Holocaust does not stand for the end of history, in every sense of ‘end’. So tabooing it from high school history lessons paves the way for more dangerous prohibitions. It is not the function of education to increase the sum of unmentionables for the sake of a civilizing process. There is no reason to assume that young people cannot bear too much reality.