Holocaust Pedagogy | Lessons of the Holocaust

Fred Whitaker teaches science, religion, and Holocaust studies at St. Francis of Assisi, a Catholic middle school in Louisville. A gifted educator, he is also a passionate advocate for inclusion of Holocaust education in middle and high schools. 

Whitaker helps his students develop empathy for the Jewish victims of the Holocaust by focusing on finding similarities between their own lives and the lives of Jewish children and teens before the Holocaust. But he also leads his students to understand how the choices, large and small, of ordinary people permitted the horrors of the Holocaust to occur. The Nazis were not alien monsters. They were people. So were the collaborators and the bystanders. Whitaker wants his students to understand how the choices they make every day define who they are and shape the world in which we live.