Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, who has built his image around his career as a teacher, earned his master’s degree in education with a thesis on how to teach genocide that deemphasized the Holocaust, suggesting it be used primarily “as a means to educate students on the dangers of racism.”
Walz submitted the 25-page paper, “Improving Human Rights and Genocide Studies In The American High School Classroom,” to Minnesota State University in 2001. In the capstone, which was obtained by The Daily Wire, Walz said research showed that Minnesota students couldn’t pinpoint the role that racism played in the Holocaust.
Rather than addressing the apparent lack of empathy for Jews, Walz suggests teachers use Holocaust “as a means to educate students on the dangers of racism,” so they can identify early signs of discrimination against other groups.
He acknowledged that this argument “was controversial because [sic] the implication the Jewish Holocaust was not viewed as a ‘watershed’ event in human history.” But he did not seem worried about the controversy, writing that “If the Jewish Holocaust is a requirement of the state or local district this is a perfect time to fit it into the unit,” but that “At no time should this current unit be referred to as a Holocaust unit.”
Elsewhere, the paper said “American high schools must begin to broaden the scope of studies into genocide and human rights violations. This means continuing to teach the lessons learned in the Jewish Holocaust, but to not limit those lessons to one incident of genocide.”
The paper proposed requirements geared toward giving “students the necessary background information to apply historical examples of abuses to current world situations.”
“What never again means is never again will European Jews be killed in Europe, it does not mean never again to genocide,” its introduction complained about a Jewish-oriented focus on the Holocaust.
Walz’s running mate, Vice President Kamala Harris, has repeatedly likened former President Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler, a rhetorical barb that some Jews say simultaneously degrades the severity of the actual Holocaust and uses its memory to manipulate people for political reasons. Trump was president from 2017 to 2021 and did not kill six million people.
Walz leaves it to schoolteachers to identify which groups and countries may be on the precipice of genocide and flag them to students. He said teachers could “single out some countries…that are experiencing pre-genocidal conditions.”
“Political, social, and economic intervention may help prevent future genocide,” Walz writes. “Great care must me [sic] taken by the teacher to choose examples of economic conditions that are found in all cases were [sic] genocide occurs. The same is true of the political climate of the times the genocide was committed.”
“Schools are teaching about the Jewish Holocaust, but the way it is traditionally being taught is not leading to increased knowledge of the causes of genocide in all parts of the world. Better methods of instruction, a variety of resources, and a commitment to the teaching of the causes of genocide rather than specific incidents will give students the understanding of the elements that lead to genocide,” he said.
Compared to state laws which mandating teaching of the Holocaust, he pointed approvingly to a Massachusetts law mandating teaching about human rights abuses — which listed “the transatlantic slave trade” first and “the holocaust and the Mussolini fascist regime” last — in which “the key change was the lack of emphasis on the Holocaust and a broader definition of genocide and human rights as areas of study. This multidisciplinary approach was what researchers have found to work.”
Walz lauded modern resources in which “the Armenian genocide and the Cambodian genocide was presented in the same manner as the database for the Holocaust. This equality of subject treatment was also reflective of the current trends in genocide education.” He does not mention the Holodomor, in which the Soviet Union killed up to five million Ukrainians.
“The traditional mindset of holocaust education stated horrible acts committed against others were done by evil people. This seemed to remove all possible causes for the acts from the human realm and move them into the good versus evil realm. This does nothing to teach the causes of the actions,” he wrote.
Walz’s capstone includes widespread spelling and grammar issues. The governor misuses apostrophes in phrases like “Amnesty Internationals’ webpage,” and repeatedly writes “lead” where he meant “led.”
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