The teaching of the Holocaust to the next generation is the central long-term challenge for the field of Holocaust education. By 2050 no living survivor will be available to speak in person to a school class. The students who will be at school in the 2030s and 2040s are the first generation that will have no possibility of meeting a survivor face to face. The institutional, pedagogical and curricular work to prepare for that condition has been under way for around twenty years and has produced a substantial body of practice, much of which is documented elsewhere on this site. The question this page treats is what the next generation of Holocaust education will look like and what the principal questions are.
The disappearance of the survivor presence
The first and most consequential change is the disappearance of the survivor presence from the school visit and the public lecture. The survivor talk has been, since the 1970s, the central educational encounter through which most non-Jewish students in the principal Western democracies have engaged with the Holocaust. The talks have varied widely in their pedagogical structure: some survivors have given prepared lectures, others have spoken without notes, some have answered questions, some have refused; some have spoken to small classes, others to school assemblies of hundreds. The variation has been substantial. The constant has been the live presence of a person in a room with a class who can say “I was there” with the documentary authority that no other source can match.
The replacement of the live presence with recorded testimony has been the principal institutional response. The USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive is the largest single source. The recorded interviews have substantial advantages over the live presence (they can be paused, replayed, used at multiple schools simultaneously, structured into curriculum) and substantial limitations (the survivor cannot answer the specific question the student is asking, cannot be moved by the encounter as a live presence is moved, cannot adjust the talk to the audience in front of them). The Dimensions in Testimony project is the most ambitious institutional attempt to reduce the limitations through interactive recorded responses; the project’s eventual success or failure will be substantially apparent only over the next two decades.
The integration of contemporary issues
The next generation of Holocaust education is being designed, in most of the major participating countries, in continuous integration with contemporary issues of antisemitism, racism, refugee policy and historical distortion. The British UCL Centre for Holocaust Education’s curriculum and teacher-training work, the German Federal Agency for Civic Education’s school programmes, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s educational division, the USC Shoah Foundation’s IWitness platform and Beth Shalom’s school programmes have all integrated contemporary applications into their materials over the past decade. The integration is not uncontroversial: some Holocaust historians have argued that the use of the Holocaust as a frame for understanding contemporary problems risks instrumentalising the events for current political purposes; the educators who have integrated the contemporary material have responded that the alternative is a Holocaust education disconnected from the lived concerns of the students, which has its own pedagogical limitations.
The treatment of contemporary antisemitism in particular has become a central component of contemporary Holocaust education. The recognition that the historical antisemitism that produced the Holocaust has not been fully removed from contemporary politics, and that the next generation of students will encounter contemporary antisemitism in their lives in ways the previous generation did not, has shaped the curriculum design.
The handling of historical distortion online
The handling of historical distortion online is a particular concern of the next generation of Holocaust educators. Students of secondary school age in 2026 encounter most of their information about the Holocaust through online platforms whose algorithmic incentives reward simplification, emotional reaction, and outright falsehood as much as accuracy. The deliberate distortion of Holocaust history, the relativising comparisons used in contemporary political argument, the conspiracy framings on TikTok and similar platforms, and the simple errors that propagate at scale online together constitute a continuous information environment that students live in and that classroom teaching cannot ignore.
The educational responses have included the integration of media literacy into Holocaust education (the British Holocaust Memorial Day Trust has produced extensive materials on this), the development of platform-specific responses (the Auschwitz Memorial’s Twitter/X account, with its three million followers, is the most-cited institutional example of a memorial site doing online correction at scale), the production of school-friendly materials specifically designed to address common misconceptions and distortions, and partnerships between Holocaust educational institutions and the platform companies. The substantial growth of TikTok-based Holocaust content among teenage users has been the most recent driver of these responses.
The institutional infrastructure
The institutional infrastructure for next-generation Holocaust education is, by 2026, substantial in the principal Western democracies. The UCL Centre for Holocaust Education in the United Kingdom (which provides teacher training, research and curriculum support to the British education system), the Federal Agency for Civic Education and the equivalent state-level Landeszentralen in Germany, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Levine Institute for Holocaust Education, the USC Shoah Foundation’s IWitness, the Memorial de la Shoah education department in France, the Anne Frank House educational programme, the Beth Shalom school programmes, and many others together constitute a denser institutional network than has existed at any point since 1945.
The questions for the next two decades are whether this infrastructure can sustain itself through the period of survivor disappearance, whether it can adapt to the changing media environment in which students encounter the subject, whether it can address the rise in contemporary antisemitism without becoming politically polarised, and whether the public commitment to Holocaust education at scale will continue when the events themselves are increasingly remote in time. The answers will be apparent in the work of the educators currently in post and the educators they are training.
See also
- Digital Preservation of Testimony USC Shoah Foundation
- The USC Shoah Foundation
- Beth Shalom Holocaust Centre
- Holocaust Memorial Day
- The Living Memory Problem
- Holocaust Education in UK Schools
Sources
- Michael Gray, Contemporary Debates in Holocaust Education, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014
- Stuart Foster and Andy Pearce (eds), Holocaust Education: Contemporary Challenges and Controversies, UCL Press, 2020
- Karen L. Riley and Carolyn Totten, “Educating the Reflective Practitioner: Researching Teachers’ Experiences with Holocaust Education”, in The Social Studies, vol 98 no 6, 2007
- Tatjana Tönsmeyer (ed), Holocaust Education in Primary Schools in the Twenty-First Century, Springer, 2017
- USC Shoah Foundation, Echoes and Reflections: A Multimedia Curriculum on the Holocaust, ongoing
- UCL Centre for Holocaust Education, https://www.holocausteducation.org.uk
- Federal Agency for Civic Education (Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung), https://www.bpb.de
- Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum on social media, https://twitter.com/AuschwitzMuseum