It’s as possible to overemphasize skepticism, to the detriment of knowledge and wisdom, as it is to overemphasize anything else. Skepticism is a useful tool, but we shouldn’t fetishize it. No one finds his way to the things that matter – integrity, responsibility, honesty, peaceableness, goodwill, contentment, wisdom – through skepticism. Nor does any of us learn a useful trade, or find his purpose in life, through prioritizing skepticism. Certainty about one’s course is the opposite of skepticism; that goes for Ayn Rand as much as for anyone else.
Education can only be successful if it recognizes that. We make value choices in everything we do. To call them arbitrary is simply to acknowledge that arbitrariness is a central and valuable characteristic of human life.
The “arbitrary” reality surrounding Holocaust denial, in particular, is that it’s a politically motivated posture held by certain categories of people, all of whom have evil associations and intentions. No one comes to it through the accident of inadequate information, or sloppy reasoning skills. It’s not just some big mistake, like thinking the sun revolves around the earth.
To investigate Holocaust denial is to enter into a sick world of darkness and brooding fury. There is nothing domesticable about it, no aspect of it that is mainstream or semi-respectable. Children, especially, have no more business being sent into that world to explore it on their own than they have being sent into the worlds of pornography or “snuff” videos. There are some choices adults have to make for children, and repudiating Holocaust denial, which is inherently malignant and vicious, is one of them.
This doesn’t mean that 8th graders should be rapped on the knuckles for questioning what they’re told about things. That’s the not the alternative to assigning them to investigate Holocaust denial. There need not be tension or anger if a student brings it up. I’m not sure 8th is the grade for this, but I can see allowing older students to pick topics on which to do skeptical forensic investigations, from whether we really landed on the moon to the reality of the Holocaust and what the truth was about the Communists pursued by Joseph McCarthy.
But this 8th grade Holocaust-denial assignment wasn’t a matter of letting students choose subjects to turn a skeptical eye on. It was a very particular, inherently freighted assignment to approach one historical event, out of many, with skepticism. The choice and the reason for it matter, and 8th graders are not competent to pass judgment on why. The community of adults has to do it for them, while communicating to them its posture and perspective. That’s actually the very essence of what we have education for.
Originally published at Liberty Unyielding/ J.E, Dyer