As a Massachusetts schoolteacher in the 1970s, Strom designed a curriculum that sought to help students find parallels between the past and the moral questions of their time.
For years, many teachers considered the Holocaust too painful to explore in the classroom. Those who might have wished to broach the topic had few tools at their disposal.
“We discovered that although we both held graduate degrees in history, we had been students who were victims of the silence on the Holocaust,” she later wrote inThey set about developing a Holocaust curriculum — the basis for what became Facing History and Ourselves — and introduced it at their school in 1976.
Facing History and Ourselves has defended itself against an array of criticism. In the 1980s, the organization was denied federal education grants after an outside evaluator criticized its curriculum for failing to sufficiently represent the perspective of the Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan.Advertisement
“The thinking behind Facing History needs to be examined more closely because it has become perhaps the most influential model for teaching the Holocaust in the United States and yet is deeply flawed,” Lipstadt wrote in the New Republic in 1995.She described the goal of Facing History — to help students reflect on their own moral decision-making — as “commendable.” But she expressed concern that the comparisons made by the curriculum were at times flawed.
Margot Stern was born in Chicago on Nov. 10, 1941, and was 5 when she moved to Memphis, where her parents, both Jewish, operated a furniture store that catered largely to African Americans.Ms. Strom grew up witnessing the cruelties of Jim Crow segregation. Thursdays, she recalled, were “colored day” at the city zoo; on any other day, African American children could not partake of its pleasures. Prejudice touched Ms.
“My teachers did not trust us with the complexities of history,” she continued. “The dogmas were more secure, more comfortable. My classmates and I were betrayed by that silence. We should have been trusted to examine real history and its legacies of prejudice and discrimination and of resilience and courage.”Ms. Strom received a bachelor’s degree in liberal arts and sciences from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1963. She began her teaching career in Skokie, Ill.
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