ABSTRACT
Education occurs through remembrance, and remembrance through education. Education implies remembrance. Wiesel’s assertion that Holocaust remembrance and Holocaust education are fundamentally reciprocal and mutually reinforcing has, over the past twenty-five years, become canonical. Even so, studies of Holocaust memory tend to have little, if anything, to say about the role of education in memory-work, just as scholarship on Holocaust education invariably leaves to one side interrogation of how teaching and learning can or should work towards remembrance. The terms teaching and learning appear self-explanatory; their meaning clear, unambiguous, self-evident. However, closer inspection reveals this is not altogether true. The culturally situated nature of memory is therefore of crucial significance; as is a recognition of memory as at once an expression of and a tributary to its cultural milieu. Wertsch’s notion of ‘mediated action’, developed as it is out of L. S. Vygotsky’s insights into ‘mediated memory’, opens up our thinking about the processes involved in remembering.
