Teacher Suspended For Spending Too Much Time On Holocaust

It is being reported by the AFP (Agency France Presse) that French Teacher Suspended For Spending Too Much Time On Holocaust:

A Jewish French history teacher has been suspended from her school for spending too much time teaching her pupils about the Holocaust and for organising trips to former Nazi death camps.

A lawyer acting for Catherine Pederzoli, a 58-year-old secondary teacher in the eastern town of Nancy, said her client had been accused by administrators of teaching the World War II massacres with insufficient "neutrality".

School inspectors investigated the teacher and compiled a report, of which AFP got a copy:

The report, compiled last month, alleged the teacher took up too much time preparing pupils for annual school trips to Poland and the Czech Republic to visit sites like the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp.

A copy of the report, seen by AFP, accuses Pederzoli of "lacking distance, neutrality and secularism" in teaching the Holocaust and of manipulating her charges through a process of "brain-washing".

Apparently, the students enjoy the class and the trips--so much so that in December some of students staged a protest during a visit by Education Minister Luc Chatel, complaining that the number of sites visited during the Holocaust field trips had been reduced. The teacher was suspected of being behind the protest--as if students have never been known to be disappointed over having field trips reduced.

Part of the question is why after organizing these trips for 15 years is the school only now making an issue of the Holocaust trips. The lawyer is claiming that it was not until the school acquired a "new management team" that the teacher claims she found herself unfairly targeted.

The AFP article really doesn't seem to indicate much in terms of anti-Holocaust sentiment.
But the JTA article does:

The inspectors criticized Pederzoli in their report for using the word “Shoah” 14 times, “whereas the term that is both neutral and judicially sound, ‘genocide,’ was only mentioned twice, as if in passing.” AFP obtained the report.

The school district for the towns of Nancy and Metz based their decision to suspend the teacher on the report, but claimed in a statement Tuesday that the suspension “had no relation to the subject of teaching history and the memory of the Shoah, to which national education is very attached.” [emphasis added]

Funny how the AFP left that out.

Technorati Tag: Holocaust and Shoah.