Manitoba creates mandatory Holocaust curriculum for schools

Manitoba has made learning about the Holocaust a mandatory part of education in classrooms.

The provincial education department announced the decision on Nov. 1o that Grades 6, 9 and 11 will all be taught about the Jewish genocide.

Nazi Germany systematically killed six million Jews and others across Europe during the Holocaust from 1941 to 1945.

Including the Holocaust as part of required teaching in Manitoba has been a 50-year push, said Belle Jarniewski, executive director for the Jewish Heritage Centre of Western Canada.

“There wasn’t a willingness to want to put this into place until now,” she said.

The Winnipeg-based organization has been working together with the province’s education department since 2023 to create the curriculum. Jarniewski created a potential curriculum, shared it with former Minister of Education and Early Childhood Learning Nello Altomare, and the province seconded a teacher for a year to complete the final curriculum. The grades chosen for the course follow similar standards in Ontario and B.C., said Jarniewski.

Prior to the mandated curriculum, Holocaust teaching was only a recommended component in the classroom, Jarniewski said. Many teachers still taught about the Holocaust and its horrors, with the Jewish heritage centre offering specialized training for teachers, she added.

Jarniewski hopes the new curriculum will help students understand the danger in ignoring hateful comments and combat Holocaust disinformation and denial.

She said knowledge of the Holocaust is diminishing “tremendously” because many of the people who experienced it firsthand have died or are in their 90s. Not having those witnesses around has made student knowledge about the Holocaust “abysmal.”

Manitoba’s education minister Tracey Schmidt said the new curriculum’s purpose is to equip students with tools to fight divisiveness, intolerance, and hatred.

“We think that more mandatory education about what was one of the world’s greatest tragedies is only going to help kids build up those skills. So, now is a better time than ever,” she said.

Seine River School Division superintendent Colin Campbell said he’s looking forward to getting the new curriculum to the division’s teachers so it can be rolled out in schools.

“When you talk about history with students now of this age, that obviously don’t have a historical knowledge base, it’s important that they are taught history,” he said.

He said the education is a crucial in helping students develop empathy and compassion because the Holocaust affected so many people directly and indirectly.

The president of Manitoba Teachers Society, a union that represents teachers across the province, agrees with the province that “all Manitobans should wholeheartedly embrace diversity and inclusion.”

“We want our students to truly benefit from this new Holocaust curriculum. We want them to understand the Holocaust’s ugly history and learn to recognize, in our own time, when similar conditions take hold anywhere in the world,” Lillian Klausen said in an emailed statement.

The Carillon wasn’t granted an interview with Hanover School Division superintendent Joe Thiessen. In an email statement, he said the division supports the province’s move to include Holocaust education as part of required teaching.

“(Hanover School Division) recognizes the important values it teaches, including respect for diversity and the importance of learning from the past,” Thiessen stated.