It was announced that A Sequel to the controversial book ‘The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas’ will be published this year

[alexi52]

For those who are unaware of the controversy surrounding the book well I guess this tweet and video should explain

 

[L Thammy]

Looked at Wikipedia's controversy section:

Scholars have criticised the film for obscuring the historical facts about the Holocaust and creating a false equivalence between victims and perpetrators.[14][15] For example, at the end of the movie, the grief of Bruno's family is depicted, encouraging the viewer to feel sympathy for Holocaust perpetrators.[16]: 125 Michael Gray wrote that the story is not very realistic and contains many implausibilities, because children were murdered when they arrived at Auschwitz and it was not possible for them to have contact with people on the outside.[16]: 121–123 [17] However, according to Nazi records there were 619 male children at the camp; all female and many other male children were gassed upon arrival.[18] A study by the Centre for Holocaust Education at University College London found that The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas "is having a significant, and significantly problematic impact on the way young people attempt to make sense of this complex past". However, a more recent study found that the film's reception is strongly based on the viewers' previous knowledge and beliefs.[19]: 173

Research by Holocaust educator Michael Gray found that more than three-quarters of British schoolchildren (ages 13–14) in his sample had engaged with The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, significantly more than The Diary of Anne Frank. The film was having a significant effect on many of the children's knowledge and beliefs about the Holocaust.[16]: 114 The children believed that the story contained a lot of useful information about the Holocaust and conveyed an accurate impression of many real-life events. The majority believed that it was based on a true story.[16]: 115–116 He also found that many students drew false inferences from the film, such as assuming that Germans would not have known anything about the Holocaust because Bruno's family did not, or that the Holocaust had stopped because a Nazi child had accidentally been gassed.[16]: 117 Other students believed that Jews had volunteered to go to the camps because they had been fooled by Nazi propaganda, rather than being violently rounded up and deported.[16]: 119 Gray recommended studying the book only after children had already learned the major facts about the Holocaust and were less likely to be misled by it,[16]: 131 while the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum and others cited it as a book/film that should be avoided entirely, and recommendations were made that true accounts, and works from Jewish authors should be prioritised.[20]

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[Magister Xehanort]

Here's a great explanation why the book is bad:

The issues are that a) it is horseshit and b) the author KNOWS that it's horseshit and yet is writing another book.

Let's address those one by one, but first a bit of background:

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, a novel by the Irish writer John Boyne, was published in 2006. To quote Boyne's website,

Nine year-old Bruno knows nothing of the Final Solution or the Holocaust. He is oblivious to the appalling cruelties being inflicted on the people of Europe by his country. All he knows is that he has been moved from a comfortable home in Berlin to a house in a desolate area where there is nothing to do and no one to play with. Until he meets Shmuel, a boy who lives a strange parallel existence on the other side of the adjoining wire fence and who, like the other people there, wears a uniform of striped pyjamas. Bruno's friendship with Shmuel will take him from innocence to revelation. And in exploring what he is unwittingly a part of, he will inevitably become subsumed by the terrible process. [NOTE: He's "subsumed" because he accidentally follows Shmuel into the gas chambers.]

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The book sold millions of copies in 46 languages, won several awards and was shortlisted for a few more, and in 2008 it was made into a movie (with Bruno played by Asa Butterfield, now better known as Otis from Sex Education on Netflix) which was also very popular. Though the book and film were commercially successful, they got mixed reviews- some loved the message and felt that it was an effective way to introduce children to the idea of the Holocaust, and others... very much did not. (We'll get to them in a minute.)

Not only were people reading the book and watching the movie for entertainment- it became a very popular option in the classroom as well for Holocaust education. In the UK, the movie's distributors aggressively marketed it in schools (as Spielberg had with Schindler's List)- which made it unsurprising when a research study in the UK uncovered that, of their sample of several hundred 13- and 14-year old students in the London area, 75% had read the book or seen the movie, compared to 45% for The Diary of Anne Frank and 9% for Schindler's List. While it might be natural for Schindler's List, an R rated film, not to have been seen by young teens, the fact that nearly twice as many students had been exposed to a fictional work about the Holocaust than a (very popular and well-read) memoir by a victim was remarked upon. (One interesting note- more girls than boys read Anne Frank, more boys than girls watched Schindler's List, but equal numbers of boys and girls read/watched Striped Pajamas.)

What was more remarkable than the outsized popularity of the book and movie was the fact that the students surveyed believed that it was based on true events, and therefore educational, and praised it for the amount of information they learned. One student even believed that the plot of the book/movie (German son of a high up Nazi official killed in the camps accidentally) was explicitly based on a true story. But even the majority of the students who understood that the book/movie were fictional stated that they learned about the Holocaust from it. Indeed, the students indicated that the part of the Holocaust that they were most familiar with was the concentration camps, and on both the surveys and in in-person interviews multiple students explicitly referred to concentration camp uniforms as "pajamas" or "striped pajamas."

Some of this information was accurate, if skewed by the book- at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter THAT much whether you call the uniforms pajamas or not. But students were also gaining incorrect/misleading impressions of the Holocaust from the book. While some were flagrant, like "I think [the Holocaust] ended when one of the Nazi children died in the poisonous gas in the Jew camp," others were similarly problematic, with claims such as:

• that Bruno's mother (as the wife of the commander) wouldn't have known what was going on in the camp, and by extension that even the adults didn't know what was happening
• that the camps were advertised as vacation camps, the Jews chose to go there, and then it wasn't what was advertised (this is apparently based on a scene in the film, not the book)
• that Auschwitz was in the middle of nowhere, far from civilization
• that Jewish Sonderkommando were involved in closing the victims in the gas chambers, and that they did it for "extra food and protection"

None of the above is accurate. We know that the wives of camp officials were perfectly aware of what was going on, and there is no reason to believe they wouldn't be- it took many thousands of people's complicity and cooperation to enable the mass extermination of the Holocaust. While one particular camp (Theresienstadt/Terezin) was staged to seem like a "model camp" for children and the elderly, no other camps- including Auschwitz- were positioned as such, and certainly the Jews did not go willingly. Auschwitz (or Oswiecim) was a large town on several rail lines in Southern Poland, far from "the middle of nowhere." The Sonderkommando for the most part only disposed of victims' bodies- they didn't actually kill them- and they did so because their lives were at stake.

All of the above is just one particular study that was done about the effects of the book/film on students' knowledge of the Holocaust. The actual inaccuracies go deeper. There would be no way that a son of a German commander like Bruno wouldn't know who Hitler (who he calls the "Fury" because he mishears the word "Fuhrer") was or that he wouldn't have been indoctrinated for literally his entire school life (not to mention home life) against Jews. It would be nearly impossible for a nine year old boy like Shmuel to not only survive even ONE day at Auschwitz (most children were gassed on arrival) but certainly for him to wander around at the perimeter to meet with Bruno. (In the book, Shmuel says that there are "lots" of them.) Even if Shmuel had survived as long as he does in the book/movie, he would have been absolutely emaciated given the conditions. At its core, the entire premise of the book makes no sense and is ahistorical.

Fundamentally, Striped Pajamas gives readers the impression not only that the Holocaust was perpetuated secretly, with innocence and ignorance a plausible possibility, but that even antisemitism wasn't the inherent and well-publicized part of Nazi ideology that it in fact was. In truth, antisemitism and anti-Jewish laws were baked in with Hitler's overall rise, and many Germans benefited directly or indirectly as Jewish property was seized, industries were Aryanized... The book tries to make a statement about how ignorance can mean complicity by pretending that German complicity came from ignorance.

Boyne calls the story "a fable," and never explicitly names Auschwitz as a real place- however, he implies it so strongly (with the supposedly misheard name "out-with") that it becomes extremely clear that the story is set in a real place. However, it is set at such a far remove from any of the realities of that place that at the end of the day it serves to obfuscate not just the horrors of the Holocaust (as you might have noted in reading the above, all of these errors soften the reader's idea of what happened, apparently in the name of seeing it through the eyes of a naive nine year old) but the actual realities of what happened. Not to mention that "fables" are generally supposed to be analogies, ways of helping us understand concepts- trying to make us understand the concept of innocence and ignorance using a purposely distorted version of a historical event doesn't work too well.
Now, in theory, as a purely fictional work... I don't think that it specifically helps the world to have historical fiction books that take such tremendous liberties with the facts, especially on this topic in a world with so much Holocaust denial in which even the minutest JAQ-ing off "questions" about the invention of ballpoint pens are used in order to imply that Anne Frank's diary is a hoax. Plus, capitalizing on the Holocaust, a "popular" and attention-grabbing topic, by completely distorting its realities is kind of disrespectful. But sure, if an adult wants to read a fictional book that they know is fiction, and know is inaccurate... whatever. The problem is that it's not generally adults reading it- it's children. And not just for entertainment but as part of Holocaust education curricula. Even if a goal of Holocaust education is moral/ethical, it must still be predicated on actual historical facts.
One additional major distortion in the story is who the story is about. It's about Bruno and his family- Shmuel doesn't appear until Chapter 10- and they are much more developed as people than Shmuel is. By centering the story around Bruno and the (false) impressions of his naivete and his mother's ignorance and his father's "just doing his job for the war effort"ness (in the movie- in the book he is a much more menacing figure), the true tragedy of the book is Bruno's death, not the tragedy of the Holocaust. As was noted in one of the works I used to write this (works cited will be at the bottom of the post), if you rewrite the story to have a happy ending, it involves someone saving Bruno from the gas chambers at the last minute. Shmuel will still die. All the others in the camp will still die. The Holocaust isn't a horror for Bruno's family until one of their own dies, and even then...
In the recent media event about a Tennessee school district removing Maus from the curriculum, a point was repeatedly made that the Holocaust should be taught through works that center victims and survivors. This makes a lot of sense- doing this not only puts them at the forefront but also humanizes these people. (When I interned at a Holocaust museum in college, nobody made it to the second-floor Holocaust exhibit until they'd seen the first-floor exhibit containing artifacts of prewar Jewish life not just in Europe but around the world.) And there are plenty of great books that do this, like Maus, Night, and Anne Frank. There is definitely a place for younger-grade books like Number the Stars, which centers a non-Jewish protagonist but is clearly researched and empathetic to the Jews featured in it. But Striped Pajamas manages none of this- it is badly-researched, its Jewish character is a token and a vehicle for the self-growth of the German main character, and the tragedy of the book isn't the mass murder of the Holocaust but the accidental death of one German boy as a result.
And after all that, I've only addressed Point A. Point B is that John Boyne KNOWS that the book is horseshit.
In January 2020, riding high on the rep that comes from writing such a popular "Holocaust novel," John Boyne tweeted this (now-deleted) opinion about the titling of Holocaust books (as in "The ____ of Auschwitz"):

I can't help but feel that by constantly using the same three words, & then inserting a noun, publishers & writers are effectively building a genre that sells well, when in reality the subject matter, & their titles, should be treated with a little more thought & consideration.

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I have no idea what the reaction to this particular opinion was (...he's annoyingly and hypocritically correct, in my opinion). The Auschwitz Memorial's Twitter account then responded with

We understand those concerns, and we already addressed inaccuracies in some books published. However, "The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas" should be avoided by anyone who studies or teaches about the history of the Holocaust.

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Boyne then responded that there were a few errors in the article that the Auschwitz Memorial's tweet linked to, probably related to details of the timeline of the movie release. He did not bother to address any of the other concerns about the book's errors. Since, according to his Twitter bio, Boyne "[doesn't]engage with any online negativity," it's unlikely he ever will. He has publicly stated that he wrote the first draft of the book in two and a half days, though he says he did supplemental research on top of that, and to the best of my knowledge has never really addressed the many, many, many criticisms by scholars and educators as to his book and its (lack of) value.
(Edited to add:) Let's also note that Boyne has been a public-facing victim of terrible research in other contexts as well. In his historical fiction novel The Traveller at the Gates of Wisdom, in a scene set in the time of Attila the Hun, a description of the formulation of a red dye is included which raised many eyebrows- because it came straight out of the game The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. This thread showed that it was unlikely to be a mistake- the first result you get when typing "ingredients red dye clothes" is that very Legend of Zelda formulation, right above a webpage title making it very clear that it's from the game. Boyne's reply is by now deleted in the original thread but essentially came down to "lol, my bad, I Googled it, I'm leaving it in because it's funny." Which, whatever else you may think about it, doesn't exactly indicate a dedication to fidelity to historical fact in Boyne's historical fiction novels.
And now he's coming out with a sequel to Striped Pajamas which immediately raises my eyebrows- centering it around Bruno's now elderly older sister and her feelings of guilt. I wonder, guilt over what exactly? And why do we need another Holocaust novel centering Germans from someone who has already proven how bad he is at it?

CITED:
Gray, "The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas: A Blessing or Curse for Holocaust Education?"
Cesarani, "Striped Pyjamas"
https://www.het.org.uk/images/downloads/Resources/Teaching_the_Holocaust_in_English.pdf

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Reddit - Dive into anything

www.reddit.com

 

[Ryuelli]

The Man in the Striped Boxers

 

[Platy]

The sequel should just be

"Chapter 1 :

Go read MAUS

the end"

 

[Divine Moleman]

This is what happens when schools ban Maus

 

[Kalor]

Finally, the sequel everyone was waiting for.

Based on some of the authors comments, I doubt this sequel will be much better and take any lessons on board.

 

[It’s Time To Go]

What a strange book to do a sequel for.

 

[gblues]

ah yes, this is the dude that, in his very serious and historically accurate book, adapted a recipe from Breath of the Wild.

 

[Jakenbakin]

Wow, I never saw the movie or read the book and didn't know all this, I just knew it as what I had thought was critically acclaimed - but I was also really young and not paying attention. Glad I learned today.

 

[collige]

I have a feeling that the backlash is going to be much stronger than it was in 2006.

This is what happens when schools ban Maus

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The book got popular before all that started. I think it's just because people get uncomfortable doing the important job of teaching kids how awful our history and would rather have a superficial, relatively guilt-free Holocaust course. IIRC schools also get wierd about teaching Anne Frank's diary too because she talked about her sexuality like a real human being going through puberty.

ah yes, this is the dude that, in his very serious and historically accurate book, adapted a recipe from Breath of the Wild.

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Wait, that was this author? smh

 

[UnpopularBlargh]

Here's a great explanation why the book is bad:

Reddit - Dive into anything

www.reddit.com

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Thanks for this.

 

[BLEEN]

I thought the movie was aces. Tho I obviously knew the context in 2010 or whatever. Never read the book tho which apparently has issues

If they do end up making a sequel movie I'll catch that.

 

[Tavernade]

Ignoring everything else, reading some of those explanations and statistics for why it's problematic, it's also clear a lot of teachers are failing their job if kids are reading the thing for class without being told it's fiction or the realities going on around it.

I don't remember what Holocaust stuff I was specifically taught in public school (besides parts of Anne Frank's Diary) because Hebrew School showed so many traumatising videos that I'm not sure exactly what I saw where. And to be clear I mean traumatising in a good way, you're supposed to be traumatised/horrified learning about this stuff.

 

[I am a Bird]

Striped pajamas 2: stripe harder

 

[A More Normal Bird]

Ignoring everything else, reading some of those explanations and statistics for why it's problematic, it's also clear a lot of teachers are failing their job if kids are reading the thing for class without being told it's fiction or the realities going on around it.

I don't remember what Holocaust stuff I was specifically taught in public school (besides parts of Anne Frank's Diary) because Hebrew School showed so many traumatising videos that I'm not sure exactly what I saw where. And to be clear I mean traumatising in a good way, you're supposed to be traumatised/horrified learning about this stuff.

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Teachers aren't necessarily the ones putting this book/film on the curricula, and simply stating that something is fictional is not sufficient to prevent it from misleading students or wider audiences, or shaping the broader views they have about a topic.

 

[Tavernade]

Teachers aren't necessarily the ones putting this book/film on the curricula, and simply stating that something is fictional is not sufficient to prevent it from misleading students or wider audiences, or shaping the broader views they have about a topic.

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Regardless of whether or not the teachers themselves have control of the curriculum, they are still presumably presenting some form of lesson plan around the book. The articles some other have quoted were about studies on students who had read the book (presumably in school, though I suppose they could have read it elsewhere). If my teachers had time to go in depth on all the symbolism in The Scarlet Letter, teachers with this in their curriculum should have time to explain the differences between reality and fiction.

 

[A More Normal Bird]

Regardless of whether or not the teachers themselves have control of the curriculum, they are still presumably presenting some form of lesson plan around the book. The articles some other have quoted were about studies on students who had read the book (presumably in school, though I suppose they could have read it elsewhere). If my teachers had time to go in depth on all the symbolism in The Scarlet Letter, teachers with this in their curriculum should have time to explain the differences between reality and fiction.

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Bluntly, no. Beyond the fact that the book itself is trash, the obvious conclusion from the survey data shown in the OP is that it isn't suitable teaching material, not that there's a mass failure on the part of individual teachers. Teachers have limited time and resources, and are often teaching to classes with varying levels of media literacy and historical knowledge. Having to work through the text/film, and then go over and explain all the ways it's misleading, and then introduce alternate material to not only correct these misleading elements but to instill a new and more accurate frame for understanding this history is basically tripling the workload, and at every step you're going to have gaps/losses in comprehension and transmission.

EDIT: Also, reminder that this book is targeted at a younger audience; I doubt it's commonly featured in upper level English classes for older teens.

 

[Tavernade]

Bluntly, no. Beyond the fact that the book itself is trash, the obvious conclusion from the survey data shown in the OP is that it isn't suitable teaching material, not that there's a mass failure on the part of individual teachers. Teachers have limited time and resources, and are often teaching to classes with varying levels of media literacy and historical knowledge. Having to work through the text/film, and then go over and explain all the ways it's misleading, and then introduce alternate material to not only correct these misleading elements but to instill a new and more accurate frame for understanding this history is basically tripling the workload, and at every step you're going to have gaps/losses in comprehension and transmission.

EDIT: Also, reminder that this book is targeted at a younger audience; I doubt it's commonly featured in upper level English classes for older teens.

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You're making this more complicated than it has to be. If it's being read in or for class (regardless of whether it should be or not) it's part of a curriculum with stuff (tests, quizzes, activities) based around it already. Making sure your class understands that it's fiction and spending ten minutes going over the history before they read it and answering/asking questions to make sure they understand it at the end isn't hard, nor would it be tripling the work. If you taught Anne Frank and people thought it was fiction it'd be the same issue (and I'm fairly certain that has been an issue in the past).

 

[A More Normal Bird]

You're making this more complicated than it has to be. If it's being read in or for class (regardless of whether it should be or not) it's part of a curriculum with stuff (tests, quizzes, activities) based around it already. Making sure your class understands that it's fiction and spending ten minutes going over the history before they read it and answering/asking questions to make sure they understand it at the end isn't hard, nor would it be tripling the work. If you taught Anne Frank and people thought it was fiction it'd be the same issue (and I'm fairly certain that has been an issue in the past).

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I'm not making the situation any more complicated than it is, as proven by the empirical evidence about the misconceptions that exposure to this work has created. It isn't as simple as "is this story fiction or non-fiction?", and spending 10 minutes explaining that the story isn't true wouldn't achieve much of anything, because the issue with misleading historical depiction doesn't end at "did this actual story about a German kid (or something like it) occur?"

The book/film depicts a historical setting but also contains a laundry list of inaccurate and misleading events/details; your hypothetical students would spend 10 minutes being told that it's not a true story, then many hours immersed in this depiction. Being exposed to it in an educational context, students are likely to consider it credible on those details unless expressly told otherwise, and even then, as I mentioned earlier, for every instance of this you create potential points of miscommunication. For this reason, it's actually quite different to something like students believing that the Diary of Anne Frank is historical fiction (note, not a hoax or fake or anything like that), because people can understand that something may be a fictional story but still draw from it both consciously/unconsciously in constructing their understanding of a setting, historical or otherwise.

So simply saying that it's not based on a true story is not sufficient. You also can't say that it's all false, because it is depicting historical events. So for this book or film to play an effective role in historical education, you'd need extensive lesson planning around interrogating and critiquing its depiction, drawing on broader literature. That is a massive chunk of time and effort compared to the usual role of historical media in education, and would most likely be highly demanding for the target age group. If it's being taught outside of history lessons, e.g. English, then the odds are there will be almost no time or resources to do any of that. So why introduce this can of worms into the classroom at all?

 

[Squid Bunny]

But Breath of the Wild 2 hasn't come out yet for John Boyne to use as reference.

Spoiler

 

[Tavernade]

I'm not making the situation any more complicated than it is, as proven by the empirical evidence about the misconceptions that exposure to this work has created. It isn't as simple as "is this story fiction or non-fiction?", and spending 10 minutes explaining that the story isn't true wouldn't achieve much of anything, because the issue with misleading historical depiction doesn't end at "did this actual story about a German kid (or something like it) occur?"

The book/film depicts a historical setting but also contains a laundry list of inaccurate and misleading events/details; your hypothetical students would spend 10 minutes being told that it's not a true story, then many hours immersed in this depiction. Being exposed to it in an educational context, students are likely to consider it credible on those details unless expressly told otherwise, and even then, as I mentioned earlier, for every instance of this you create potential points of miscommunication. For this reason, it's actually quite different to something like students believing that the Diary of Anne Frank is historical fiction (note, not a hoax or fake or anything like that), because people can understand that something may be a fictional story but still draw from it both consciously/unconsciously in constructing their understanding of a setting, historical or otherwise.

So simply saying that it's not based on a true story is not sufficient. You also can't say that it's all false, because it is depicting historical events. So for this book or film to play an effective role in historical education, you'd need extensive lesson planning around interrogating and critiquing its depiction, drawing on broader literature. That is a massive chunk of time and effort compared to the usual role of historical media in education, and would most likely be highly demanding for the target age group. If it's being taught outside of history lessons, e.g. English, then the odds are there will be almost no time or resources to do any of that. So why introduce this can of worms into the classroom at all?

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Oh I'm not arguing that it should be in the classroom at all. Just that if it is (which it seems to be despite people's best efforts) and any student walks away from the lesson thinking the specific characters were real people or that, as the article said, "I think [the Holocaust] ended when one of the Nazi children died in the poisonous gas in the Jew camp" than the teacher didn't do a good enough job with the lesson plan.

I think we both agree with each other on a lot of this, you're arguing from a camp of "this shouldn't be in schools at all" (which I agree with) and I'm saying "but if it is there's a bare minimum that should be done to ensure the students don't come away with these egregious misconceptions the book isn't even responsible for."

 

[Aomame]

You're making this more complicated than it has to be. If it's being read in or for class (regardless of whether it should be or not) it's part of a curriculum with stuff (tests, quizzes, activities) based around it already. Making sure your class understands that it's fiction and spending ten minutes going over the history before they read it and answering/asking questions to make sure they understand it at the end isn't hard, nor would it be tripling the work. If you taught Anne Frank and people thought it was fiction it'd be the same issue (and I'm fairly certain that has been an issue in the past).

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I'm an English teacher. Ten minutes is in NO WAY sufficient to explain the historical context of the Holocaust before reading a 200 page book about it that contains many inaccuracies.

 

[Tavernade]

I'm an English teacher. Ten minutes is in NO WAY sufficient to explain the historical context of the Holocaust before reading a 200 page book about it that contains many inaccuracies.

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I would like to think ten minutes is enough time to ensure no student comes away thinking "I think [the Holocaust] ended when one of the Nazi children died in the poisonous gas in the Jew camp."

 

[krazen]

I get the discussion around historical/fiction as someone who dabbles in creative endeavors but the fact it's centered with/focus on sympathy for the nazi kid and fam ultimately feeds into the 'getting called racist is worse than racism' where the effective badguys abhorrent behavior is a teaching tool with the victims just a plot device.

The issue is the victims are seen as subhuman and centering the badguys doesn't fix that or teach that lesson

 

[Min]

I would like to think ten minutes is enough time to ensure no student comes away thinking "I think [the Holocaust] ended when one of the Nazi children died in the poisonous gas in the Jew camp."

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But then compound that 10 minutes with all the other 10 minutes you would need to explain all the other inaccuracies in the material you're teaching.

If you have to stop every chapter and explain why actually what is depicted in the book is wrong, then you're wasting a lot of time on material that would be better served on material without inaccuracies.

 

[A More Normal Bird]

Oh I'm not arguing that it should be in the classroom at all. Just that if it is (which it seems to be despite people's best efforts) and any student walks away from the lesson thinking the specific characters were real people or that, as the article said, "I think [the Holocaust] ended when one of the Nazi children died in the poisonous gas in the Jew camp" than the teacher didn't do a good enough job with the lesson plan.

I think we both agree with each other on a lot of this, you're arguing from a camp of "this shouldn't be in schools at all" (which I agree with) and I'm saying "but if it is there's a bare minimum that should be done to ensure the students don't come away with these egregious misconceptions the book isn't even responsible for."

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Yeah that post was a bit long and focused on the book itself which I know you're not advocating for, but going back to your first post, you talked about teachers were failing to teach students that it's fiction as well as "the realities around it". So what I'm trying to emphasise is that the latter is a lot to unpack, and by exposing students to the work in depth you end up playing wack a mole with every detail.

The other thing is that it's perfectly plausible that a teacher tells a class that it's a work of fiction, and for some students they either miss that or it doesn't sink in, for others they assume it's a fictionalised version of actual events etc... Basically when we see that a work of fiction being used to teach history is creating widespread misconceptions, to me the first thing to acknowledge is that the use of film/narrative fiction in teaching history (or the existence of popular historical fiction that students might have seen outside of the classroom) is actually really complicated, rather than assuming that hundreds/thousands of teachers all failed to clear the first hurdle.

 

[Tavernade]

But then compound that 10 minutes with all the other 10 minutes you would need to explain all the other inaccuracies in the material you're teaching.

If you have to stop every chapter and explain why actually what is depicted in the book is wrong, then you're wasting a lot of time on material that would be better served on material without inaccuracies.

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I agree with you. The book obviously shouldn't be taught at all. My main point was that looking at some of the surveys done on children that had been taught it, it seemed to me they'd been doubly let down by how it was talked about in class on top of the book itself.

Yeah that post was a bit long and focused on the book itself which I know you're not advocating for, but going back to your first post, you talked about teachers were failing to teach students that it's fiction as well as "the realities around it". So what I'm trying to emphasise is that the latter is a lot to unpack, and by exposing students to the work in depth you end up playing wack a mole with every detail.

The other thing is that it's perfectly plausible that a teacher tells a class that it's a work of fiction, and for some students they either miss that or it doesn't sink in, for others they assume it's a fictionalised version of actual events etc... Basically when we see that a work of fiction being used to teach history is creating widespread misconceptions, to me the first thing to acknowledge is that the use of film/narrative fiction in teaching history (or the existence of popular historical fiction that students might have seen outside of the classroom) is actually really complicated, rather than assuming that hundreds/thousands of teachers all failed to clear the first hurdle.

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That's absolutely fair. I agree.

 

[makonero]

But Breath of the Wild 2 hasn't come out yet for John Boyne to use as reference.

Spoiler

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This is both hilarious and sad

 

[It’s Time To Go]

Didn't seem worth making a new topic for. Book is absolutely awful. I reckon a lot of choice quotes from this will be making their way to that sub Reddit for cringe quotes of men writing women.

 

[Messofanego]

Huh, never read the book or watched the film, so this is all new information about how much it's already misled children about the Holocaust. I think out of media, we only got Schindler's List in school. Never read Anne Frank's diary, so I'll now check it out.

 

[NunezL]

Hoping it's got a better message than "He died in the concentration camp but this one didn't deserve it because he wasn't even jewish"

 

[CallmeDave]

I'm not sure why a school would choose to read this when the perfectly good Night by Elie Wiesel exists.

 

[deepFlaw]

I had forgotten that the dye googling thing was by the same guy…

I would say it's "brave" of him to have the gall to put out a sequel like this, but this is before googling to see if the public reception is what it deserves this time around. And I'm prepared to be disappointed enough by the reception to think he knew he could get away with it.