What lessons, if any, do students infer from their studies of the Holocaust?

Abstract

This paper reports on a study analysing the lessons that 15 A Level (aged 17–18) students inferred from their studies of the Holocaust. All the participants had studied the Holocaust at an advanced level. The participants were interviewed in small groups (three to five participants), with the transcriptions of those interviews being iteratively coded, adopting an inductive grounded theory approach. Results were highly varied, with many different types of lessons being considered, though the most common concerned antiracist lessons, lessons about state systems and lessons about human nature. There was a tendency amongst participants to focus less on moral/deontological lessons from the Holocaust, and more on ontological lessons. Participants independently identified the types of lessons that Holocaust education organisations (IHRA, 2022) and some theorists (Short, 1999, 2003) suggested/hoped that they might. The small sample size and dominance of certain participants should be noted as barriers to the generalisability of the findings reported here.