for context im in the south, there was a kkk group in my neighborhood. the there used to be confederate flags EVERYWHERE in highshool but they are mostly gone since the blm movement. white boys would argue that if the nazis leaders should have been killed then confederate leaders should have been killed and thats bad because then they may not have been born/ southern culture wouldn't exist. edit also

i went to a charter arts school if that explains anything. the principal owned the school and was racist and homophobic, he ruled with an iron fist.

ad hominem attacks on other students

did you go to reddit high school

There are times when participatory modes of pedagogy are appropriate, and that's a lot of the time. But there are also times where a didactic mode of pedagogy is not only appropriate but imperative.

Opening up a classroom debate on "whether the Nazis at the Nuremberg Trials deserved it" is a major failing on behalf of that teacher. If not for the fact that it facilitated the students to reinforce sympathy for Nazis then at the very least for the fact that it created a hostile educational environment for at least two students.

CW: racism, SA ahead!

If this isn't obvious enough then imagine if a teacher decided to have a classroom discussion about whether women lie about being raped or if black people deserved to be enslaved.

The potential positive educational outcomes that might come from this sort of situation are entirely outweighed by the very real risks that it creates in a classroom setting. As an educator, one of the worst things you can do is to create a platform for misinformation because that is the exact opposite of what you're tasked with doing.

Your teachers were fuckups and the administration of your school can go to hell.

I do think the general opinion on the Nuremberg trials in my high school class was “lock them up and throw away the key,” I really don’t know how you mess that one up.

However, they did teach us that WW2 started when the USSR and Germany formed an alliance to invade and divide Poland. And they did have us debate if dropping the atomic bombs on Japan was justified, with most coming to the conclusion of “Yes” because they told us plainly that more people would’ve died if we didn’t use them.

i got sent to the principals office for "ad hominem attacks on other students" in 6th grade

This is legit the most liberal thing I've ever read wtf

I had a similar experience in a college class where the question was "When is it okay for the government to torture someone?" and I was the only person in the class who said "never"

What the fuck mate

Every history class I ever had started with either Ancient Greece or Columbus, fell behind schedule, and ended somewhere between the Civil War and World War 1.

The only exception was APUSH, which got all the way to the great depression, then was like "uh... exam's in two weeks, go study the rest."

I can’t recall it even being discussed in my APUSH class twenty fucking years ago BUT we did have an interesting class project for the post-Civil War era where the class was asked to choose how to make things better for industrial workers. We had two choices: unionization, or Taylorism (make them work harder and smarter). The vast majority of the class picked Taylorism. This was a class filled with white liberals, too, plus one Republican who kept his mouth shut. I was a liberal at the time but the results here really shocked me; two of my friends and I were the only ones who voted for unionization. The other students were mostly overachieving white women who have spent their lives pushing paper at do-nothing nonprofits as far as I know.

I was thinking recently how interesting it was that the only theory the class really had was that everything in America before the Civil War was leading up to the Civil War. But after the Civil War, there’s really no theory at all. It’s just a glorified recitation of important dates and names, basically.

I loved the class though and got A’s for both semesters, which was rare for me as a mediocre student. I thought the teacher was great. I remember him mentioning that he thought Jefferson was cool because he was a nerd 😬

I ran into him as an adult after I had spent years living overseas. When I told him about the universal health care system in [non-communist Asian country], he clearly just did not believe me. My family and I had used the hospitals there hundreds of times, it was always quick and fast and cheap and effective, and that’s the way it was and still is for tens of millions of people in that country, but this fact meant that his precious liberal heroes were lying to him about the impracticality of universal health care, so he just assumed that I was insane.

A year or two ago we argued on Facebook about how science cannot be apolitical (since nothing is apolitical) and haven’t spoken since.

honestly I don't recall the trials getting more than a mention. my school was in an area with a large jewish population so a lot of the kids probably got so much education about the nazis that they were sick of it. we got a pretty good lesson on the trial of sacco and venzetti tho. my HS history teacher was kinda cool like that.

learned about it in early high school
there wasn't really a debate here
then again this town was completely flattened by the nazis, and most of us had grandparents who lived through it so ww2 era nazi shit wasn't popular

I had the same social studies/history teacher for 2/4 years of high school so I'll just refer to his classes because I literally don't remember the other 2. Guy eventually become a super chud and when Trump first ran he filled his yard with Trump signage. In school he kept his political opinions mostly under wraps, at least not overt. I was going to a mostly white suburban high school at the time and never had the experience that people were defending nazis from the Nuremberg trials. The education around WWII was pretty standard USA did all the heavy lifting, the nukes were justified, the nazis were bad but don't think too hard about operation paperclip, and look how bad the USSR was sending waves of humans to die.

I also remember in that class we had to pick a US president and write a glowing essay praising them. I do remember thinking it was impossible, doing some cursory research and then learning about the New Deal and FDR for the first time and easily wrote it while bashing Reagan. Was the only group to pick FDR and I'm pretty sure a few picked Reagan and the standard early presidents everyone loves to lionize with next to nothing being said about slaveholding status.

I was also full in my conspiracy theorist arc in high school and was able to convince the teacher to let us watch Zeitgeist in class and so the entire class got to watch 2 parts of it, the 9/11 was an inside job, and the federal reserve system part where it argued:

Part III states that the Federal Reserve System is controlled by a small cabal of international bankers who conspire to create global calamities to enrich themselves. Three wars involving the United States during the twentieth century are highlighted as part of this alleged agenda, started by specifically engineered events, including the sinking of the RMS Lusitania, the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the Gulf of Tonkin Incident. The film asserts that such wars serve to sustain conflict in general and force the U.S. government to borrow money, thereby increasing the profits of the international bankers. The film also claims that the Federal Income Tax is illegal. Zeitgeist: the Movie claims that the U.S. Government's income tax is unconstitutional.

Part III also alleges a secret agreement to merge the United States, Canada and Mexico into a North American Union as a step toward the creation of a single world government. The film speculates that under such a government, every human could be implanted with an RFID chip to monitor individual activity and suppress dissent.

So in the end I suppose the nazi propaganda was coming from inside the home. The website "The United States is the Biggest Terrorist Organization on Earth" or something close to that title helped sorta break the brain worms, it was also super far down the conspiracy rabbit hole but channeled it in the right direction to eventually lead to my leftist awakening.

Also that teacher refused to ever tell us who he voted for in Obama v. Mccain because it was too political and that if we ever came back after graduating he'd tell us.

my grandpa's cousing was a jurer in the trials and i got to see all his pictures and memorabilia

I was homeschooled with A Beka Books-brand Christian curriculum, and it handled the subject the same way. From what I remember, it was posed as an open-ended "Was this acceptable to do?"

My only classmate was my brother, but I do remember fighting with him about whether or not the Conquistadors were a force for good. He only got worse, too. I went no-contact with him after a certain point

We learnt that they killed the Nazi leaders and it was good. This was at some English style boys only boarding school I got a scholarship too even, so you'd expect them to have sympathy for the fash. But that was too low, even for them.

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