ABSTRACT

This chapter provides the Education Committee’s inquiry and findings as a launching pad for broader consideration of how teaching about the Holocaust and teaching about genocide relate to one another in England. Given the long history of Holocaust education in Britain and its standing in the sphere of Holocaust politics internationally, the anatomy of this relationship has salience and international relevance. As ‘the Holocaust’ began to become a retrospective ‘legal norm’ and contemporary ‘social norm’ of genocide, this opened the door for conceptual confusion as to what distinguished ‘the Holocaust’ from ‘genocide’, who and what the phrase referred to, and how either terms related to late twentieth century, post-imperial Britain. Dramatic changes in the social fabric of British society from the 1960s onwards, accelerated by demographic upheavals and economic instability, resulted in increasing cultural conflict during the last quarter of the twentieth century.