House and Senate budget chairs have agreed on funding levels for Holocaust education.
House budget conference chair Tom Leek accepted the Senate offer Saturday of $2.05 million, the full amount sought by Sen. Joe Gruters originally.
The money will be allocated to consulting, development, and delivery of curriculum, allowing for consistent educational standards for students in grades 5-12.
Per the funding request, the curriculum "must be developed by external sources, nationally or internationally endorsed." It will include interviews of those who survived the Holocaust, and "age-appropriate content," including teacher guides and quizzes.
In addition to offering historical context for anti-semitism, the coursework will offer current examples of the same, to challenge students not to just be a "bystander," but to be an "upstander." The students should learn "empathy" for victims of Holocausts, particularly the European Jews who were massacred by the Nazi regime.
The importance of this educational initiative is massive.
Just last year, a survey from the Holocaust Education Research Council revealed that one in 10 Americans don't believe the Holocaust happened, despite massive documentary evidence proving that millions of Jews and other groups were systematically killed by Adolf Hitler's Germany and other genocidal abettors.
According to the survey, basic details about the Holocaust aren't known by many Americans — 21% said they did not know that the Holocaust took place during World War II; one in four could not identify Auschwitz as a concentration camp; and more than a third said they didn't know that six million Jewish people were killed during the Holocaust.
In addition to questions on Holocaust history, the survey asked whether respondents had seen Nazi symbols in the past five years, either in-person or online. About two-fifths (41%) said they had.
The survey also found that 24% of Americans believe that Jewish people have capitalized on the historical tragedy to advance an "agenda" or goal, such as gaining disproportionate influence in politics, finance or media. Though untrue, such beliefs are a trope of conspiratorial antisemitism.
Still, the survey found that 93% of Americans believe it is important to continue teaching about the Holocaust, and 80% believe something horrific like it could happen again.
Florida is one of 16 states to statutorily mandate that K-12 students receive instruction on the Holocaust and the law requires that instruction to make clear the Holocaust was a "systematic, planned annihilation of European Jews and other groups by Nazi Germany." Florida was the fourth state in the country to institute the requirement, which has been in effect since 1994.
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Drew Wilson contributed to this report.
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