Great 2008 article on how Tim Walz taught high school students about genocide

[Ramsey Barner]

What factors, he asked them to determine, had been present when Germans slaughtered Jews, Turks murdered Armenians, the Khmer Rouge ravaged their Cambodian countrymen?

[****]

For nine weeks through the winter and early spring that school year, through the howling blizzards and the planting of the first alfalfa on the plains, the class pored over data about economics, natural resources and ethnic composition. They read about civil war, colonialism and totalitarian ideology. They worked with reference books and scholarly reports, long before conducting research took place instantly online.

[****]

When the students finished with the past, Mr. Walz gave a final exam of sorts. He listed about a dozen current nations — Yugoslavia, Congo, some former Soviet republics among them — and asked the class as a whole to decide which was at the greatest risk of sliding into genocide.

[****]

"You have to understand what caused genocide to happen,” Mr. Walz said.... “Or it will happen again.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/23/education/23education.html

[Ocelot II]

1. Exactly the sort of education the GOP in some states is trying to prohibit.

[usaf-vet]

2. That remind me of a H.S. teacher in the early 1980's who taught Social Studies / Math / computers. He fabricated a......

... project to teach the kids about how wars affected the population locally. The students were assigned to go to local cemeteries and gather information from the headstones: name, birth and death data, and sex. They then entered that data into the only database application available for use on MacIntosh computers.

They learned as a class how to design a database, enter gathered data, and analyze the results using its sorting functions.

The data, as he expected, showed increasing numbers of young men dying in their early 20s, 30s and 40s. They graphed the results against the historical years of each war.

It was a great exercise that brought the teacher and the school a statewide award.