Overview:
In examining The Zone of Interest and Ohio’s “divisive concepts” legislation, a retired teacher argues that just as parents must confront difficult truths to raise resilient children, educators have a moral obligation to teach the full, unvarnished history—including its atrocities—so that students can develop critical thinking skills and a just moral compass.
One of the most chilling movie scenes I’ve ever seen is of a woman removing laundry from a clothesline. Allow me to explain. The film, not well known but critically acclaimed and Oscar-nominated for Best Motion Picture, uses unconventional cinematography, no English dialogue, and in its entirety, haunts me.
“The Zone of Interest” (2023) is the true story of the commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss, and his wife Hedwig, raising their five children in a well-maintained house and meticulous garden that happen to be adjacent to the notorious camp. The story is told entirely from the POV of the household. No acts of violence are ever seen in the film, but they are heard – in the screams and gunshots that are consistently and distantly heard from beyond the garden wall – and disturbingly, the viewer realizes, smelled.
In this context, mundane scenes of children swimming in the backyard pool and servants completing domestic chores begin to horrify the viewer. The very brief scene of the family’s laundry hastily removed from the line takes place in the deep of night (and eerily captured through a night vision lens) as a flaming smokestack begins to spew smoke and the soot of human remains. Obsessive bathing and housecleaning are metaphoric threads that run through the film. Hedwig tries to sanitize their home and lives and protect her children from horrific truths, in spite of the atrocities that occur with increasing frequency just steps away from their tidy house and garden, under her husband’s commands.
The Need for Parents to Protect Children: Innocent or Not
In spite of its hideous nature, Hedwig’s behavior is oddly familiar. The urge to “sanitize” is strong for parents who want to fiercely protect their children from harm, but as any scientist will tell you, a child who is isolated from germs will fail to develop immunity to them. Are education policymakers likewise harming students if they try to isolate them from the hard truths of human experience? Are we teaching any history well if we are not teaching all of it?
Within the current administration and in many state legislatures, some key decision makers want us to believe that this whitewashing of history serves the public good. They argue that so-called “divisive concepts” – namely, issues surrounding race and gender – harm children who may internalize guilt from the unsavory actions of past leaders with whom they share some commonality. The stated goals are to encourage national pride and unity and to empower parents with a greater stake in local control. The movement to remove controversial topics from classrooms is gaining momentum, but at what cost?
I believe we have a moral obligation to teach controversial topics in age-appropriate ways in our classrooms. Kids have the right to all of the information they need to develop those critical thinking skills we value and that adulthood and society demand from them. And maybe they need more than just the facts. As educators, should we insert our beliefs into critical thinking exercises? In my own teaching experience, I came face to face with this moral dilemma when a colleague once asked a few simple questions of me at a routine meeting.
As a middle school social studies teacher, I’d been trying to keep up with where the political wind was blowing in my state.
Ohio: HB327: Divisive Concepts Bill
In 2022, the Ohio House introduced HB327, which came to be known as the “divisive concepts” bill.
Among the concerns of the bill’s sponsors was the idea that teaching controversial topics would pit students against each other. Specifically, the bill prohibited “critical race theory” in the K-12 curriculum, even though that label typically applied to only college-level elective courses, and it would ban the use of “1619 Project” (New York Times) resources in classrooms.
A coalition of parents, teachers, and others who opposed the bill organized a group calling itself “Honesty for Ohio Education.” They criticized the bill as a misguided attempt to enforce book bans and to censor discussions about race and gender in K-12 classrooms. More than 30 education advocacy groups joined the effort to create transparency and encourage Ohioans to contact their representatives.
Is There a Right Way to Teach About Andrew Jackson?
Ultimately, the bill never progressed to a full House vote, but the debate generated considerable public comment and media attention. So in my US History/Government course for 8th-grade students, I tried to find the middle ground, anticipating some pressure to make future lessons less “divisive.” I conducted an inventory of resources I’d used in past years for an upcoming unit on the early presidents and the Andrew Jackson era.
That’s Andrew Jackson, the former president whose image may or may not continue to grace the $20 bill, depending on who occupies the Oval Office or holds the majority in Congress. He’s the president credited by historians for energizing working-class voters and the expansion of democracy, but also for defying a Supreme Court decision and the resulting Trail of Tears. Searching for some fresh tools and attempting to create an unbiased approach to the lesson, I found an online graphic organizer for analyzing his actions titled “Andrew Jackson: Hero or Villain?” It prompted students to research the facts of the era and draw their own conclusions.
Perfect! Or so I thought.
Because in our next meeting, as I shared the template and some ideas for student engagement, a respected member of my team asked me the gut-check questions that I hadn’t expected:
“What will you do if a student completes the exercise and then does a really convincing job of vocally defending the injustices? Do you let students walk out the classroom door with a list of reasons for supporting genocide?”
He was right. At some point, wouldn’t I have to interject? If the lesson is about Andrew Jackson and the Trail of Tears, or slavery, or the Holocaust, do I have a moral obligation to shape the narrative around these “divisive concepts?”
This wasn’t the first time I’d had to consider the consequences. In a course with content standards that included the Antebellum era and the Civil War, I frequently faced students’ questions about the redemptive quality of the so-called “kind treatment” sometimes mentioned in history texts, or the slave owners known to display it, such as Washington and Jefferson.
To answer this, I directed them to primary source documents. The most compelling was an archive of the slave codes, codifying the harsh realities that an enslaved woman could not name or claim her child, that her children could be sold, or that the consequences for taking the life of an enslaved person were little more than a fine or restitution. The class usually arrived at a consensus: regardless of the conditions, a human being defined as property under law was a red line that should never be crossed.
During the 2022 debate over Ohio’s divisive concepts bill, Ohio Education Association President Scott DiMauro told a local ABC affiliate reporter:
“There are some aspects of our history where there aren’t two equal sides to talk about. You can’t both sides the holocaust. You can’t both sides slavery. We have to be honest about calling our injustices in our history in order for our students to learn from our past.”
Scott dimauro, ohio education association president
Enact Advance Ohio Education Act
This year in Ohio, the debate came full circle when the Enact Advance Ohio Education Act (SB1) was signed into law in late March by Republican Governor Mike DeWine. The proponents of the new law say it will promote a “Students First” agenda for the state’s public colleges and universities. Among its provisions are mandates to eliminate DEI programs, trainings, and orientations. The law also forbids faculty strikes or walkouts.
Before the law took effect on June 27, a statewide initiative was underway to repeal it, sparked by professors from Youngstown State University and other supporters of higher education. However, the large-scale, grassroots effort failed to meet the deadline to gather 250,000 signatures needed for a statewide referendum in November. According to a brief written by Ohio State Senator Casey Weinstein (D-Hudson), the law is an attack on academic independence, and it will hamper the ability of the state’s universities to remain competitive in attracting talented students and “to cultivate a skilled and diverse workforce.”
On the issue of academic freedom, Weinstein wrote: “I agree universities are places where students and faculty can engage with complex issues. However, forcing professors to teach ‘both sides of history’ will only give a platform for holocaust denial, conspiracy theories, or other absurd denials of truth and fact in the classroom.”
Is there a Moral Obligation to Teach Facts of History?
Can a teacher be a facilitator for students on a fact-finding mission, or is there a moral obligation to examine the facts of history in a moral context? Teachers need to determine for themselves their red line. As for me, allowing any student to leave the classroom thinking there might be some justification for any of the atrocities of the past would constitute my enormous failure as an educator for our future citizens and leaders.
To teach history well, we need to teach all of it: the triumphs, the tragedies, and the trajectories that are created when imperfect leaders encounter the proverbial fork in the road. History is the study of “what ifs” and the acknowledgement of our experiences, shared and unshared. To teach it well, we need to see it all. Sometimes, and within the parameters of age-appropriate content, the children need to see the dirty laundry.
Lisa Skelly is a retired middle school educator from northeast Ohio. Prior to her 25 years in education, she earned a journalism degree from Bowling Green State University and has written across a variety of platforms as a freelance consultant. She enjoys historical fiction, travel and hiking, with a goal of visiting as many national parks as time allows. She is an advocate for human rights and environmental protection with a strong desire to pass on a better world to her beloved grandchildren.
