The New Jersey Famine Curriculum: A Report

Abstract

The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it. OSCAR WILDE Is 1995, when first learned that New Jersey Education Commission had been empowered by legislature to consider course materials on wide range of genocides, contacted Dr. Paul Winkler, Executive Director of Commission, and asked him if Great Irish Famine could be included. He immediately asked me, Are you claiming genocide? said, I would like teachers and students to make up their own minds. He agreed, and encouraged development of our Irish Famine Curriculum. The 116-page curriculum is available on Web site of Nebraska Department of Education. Any teacher or student with a computer and modem can read, print, or download all of it using HTML or PDF formats. The Illinois, Colorado, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Idaho Departments of Education have linked to curriculum on Nebraska site, along with National Archives of Republic of Ireland and Gateway to Educational Materials (GEM) at Syracuse University. The curriculum is indexed by Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC) at Indiana University, which has distributed microfiche copies to one thousand subscribing college and university libraries. The New Jersey curriculum was approved by state Commission on 10 September 1996 and distributed to state schools. The following month, New York Governor George Pataki signed a law mandating instruction on mass starvation in Ireland. The Sunday Times of London responded on 13 October with a staff editorial entitled An Irish Hell, but not a which stated: To compare, as Mr. Pataki has done, Britain's policy to that of Hitler towards Jews is as unhistorical as it is offensive. Not least to Jews, tragedy of whose is necessarily lessened by comparison with an Irish catastrophe that was neither premeditated nor man-made. Yet Governor Pataki had not compared Great Famine to in either his written or spoken remarks. A week later, British Ambassador John Kerr wrote to Pataki, saying: It seems to me rather insulting to many millions who suffered and died in concentration camps across Europe to imply that their man-made fate was in any way analogous to natural disaster in Ireland a century before. The Famine, unlike Holocaust, was not deliberate, not premeditated, not man-made, not genocide, (1) On 10 March 1997 Washington Times published a full-page Insight magazine editorial deriding Pataki as the greatest liar in America and ridiculing idea of Irish Famine education. You say Potato, They say Holocaust was illustrated by a photograph of a potato wrapped in barbed wire. On 26 August, Boston Globe published Unnecessary Curriculum Bill, attacking Massachusetts State Senator Warren Tolman for promoting instruction on Great Irish Famine, Armenian Genocide, and Holocaust: As Tolman bill is now worded, teachers might be encouraged to treat Irish famine on same level of moral depravity as Armenian genocide and Holocaust. That would be a misreading of historical record. While British approach to mass starvation was often brutal, arrogant and unfeeling, no state-run death camps disfigured Irish countryside. The argument that classroom discussion of mass starvation should be discouraged because British behavior did not match barbarity of Nazis during is central to all objections against famine education. Because is best documented, most systematic, cruel, and ruthless genocide of twentieth century, it has almost become very definition of genocide. Opponents of famine education raise with intention of demonstrating that, if Great Irish Famine was not comparable (no state-run death camps), then famine was not a matter of genocide. …