Ill Disposed
K.C. Johnson, Brooklyn College–CUNY

Over the last decade, a new requirement has emerged in teacher-training programs around the country. According to the standards outlined by the National Council for Accreditation in Teacher Education (NCATE), prospective teachers must possess the "knowledge, skills, and dispositions necessary to help all students learn." We can easily identify "knowledge" and "skills." But what exactly is "dispositions" theory? And why should people outside of the Education establishment be very much concerned about it?

In its 2000 statement of standards, NCATE defined dispositions as "the values, commitments, and professional ethics that influence behaviors towards students, families, colleagues, and communities and affect student learning, motivation, and development as well as the educator's own professional growth." By 2002, the national accrediting agency was also mentioning a new definition: requiring would-be teachers to hold a prescribed set of beliefs on issues that the education school or department deems important -- such as a commitment to diversity or social justice.

"For example," the accrediting agency's 2002 assessment document noted, if an education department has "indicated that a commitment to social justice is one disposition it expects of teachers who can become agents of change, then it is expected that unit assessments include some measure of a candidate's commitment to social justice."

To repeat: the national accrediting agency for education schools and departments has said that it's acceptable for prospective public school teachers to be evaluated on the basis of their political beliefs.

Annual conferences of education professors and administrators devoted to dispositions made this point clear, with presentations based on such claims as:

• "One of the most difficult, but important, dispositional perceptions to cultivate in a pre-service teacher is that of teacher as a catalyst for social reform."
• "Education is inherently a moral enterprise. Therefore, we need teachers who possess knowledge and discernment of what is good or virtuous, who have the courage to act on their beliefs, who are committed to justice, and who truly care about students, parents, and society."
• Educational equity requires cultivating "awareness that different cultures may require different teaching practices. However, the need for different teaching strategies or practices cannot be accommodated when teachers are not aware of or sensitive to what those needs are."

A brief look at how education schools have applied the "dispositions" standard reveals how easily this requirement can become a tool for professors -- in a field notorious for its lack of intellectual diversity -- to screen out potential public school teachers who hold undesirable political beliefs. Education schools from UNLV to Teachers College to George Mason to IUPUI to Brooklyn College all have some sort of requirement linking dispositions to demonstrating a "commitment to social justice."

Yet deciding what constitutes "social justice" is an inherently political, not educational, judgment. Many people, for instance, consider opposition to abortion a litmus test of a person's "commitment to social justice." Others might argue -- indeed, many in Congress do argue -- that social justice is not possible without a commitment to retaining the traditional family structure, or increasing the role of religion in American life, or even restructuring the tax code to create more of an ownership-based society. Yet I strongly doubt that the vast majority of education school professors would deem any of these policies as showing support for social justice.

In its most pernicious form, dispositions theory is a tool for education schools to ensure that the next generation of public school students is educated solely by those teachers who have accepted their professors' ideological agenda. Perhaps state legislators might want to look hard at this issue.

NAS3:18 PM

A Roadmap of an Earthly Hell
Neil Cameron, John Abbott College

January 2005 marks the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet troops. BBC Television, in a co-production with KCET Los Angeles, is commemorating the event with a six-part historical series, now appearing on PBS. The BBC producer, Laurence Rees, has written a book -- Auschwitz: A New History -- to go with the series.

Rees could draw on several sources, like Russian archives only recently opened, not available to long-famous Holocaust scholars like Raul Hilberg and Lucy Davidowicz. He has drawn on capable historians like Ian Kershaw and Christopher Browning, and has combined readability with documentary proof. He has assembled a revealing collection of eyewitness testimonies from both survivors and perpetrators. Furthermore, he brought to his grim task an unusual level of previous experience in the study of historical horrors, having produced previous book-TV combinations on Soviet mass exterminations and on Japanese atrocities in the Far East.

Auschwitz is actually a capsule account of all major aspects of the Holocaust. Despite its horrifying theme, it is an unfailingly fascinating book to read. This project was more than a commemoration. Rees makes it explicit that one of its purposes is to provide a refutation, for all but the hopelessly demented, of the Holocaust denials of David Irving and his admirers. This kind of pseudohistory has been given a new lease on life by the internet, which has made it possible for promoters of conspiracy theories to create networks, and to mislead undergraduates searching for term paper material. The conspiracy theorists themselves, of course, are unreachable by reasoned argument. When German newspapers reported recollections of an Auschwitz guard of horrors in which he had personally participated, he received numerous letters from Holocaust deniers who insisted that he had not seen what he had seen.

What made Auschwitz most remarkable, and eventually most notorious, was its sheer physical size and multiple components, including the giant I. G. Farben synthetic rubber factory. It became a hellish combination of slow murder by incredible cruelty and immediate extermination. The camp was actually started for Soviet prisoners of war, at first sending prisoners elsewhere for execution, and initially lacking both gas chambers and crematoria. Once these facilities were completed at the Birkenau component, however, Auschwitz became a full-fledged death factory. Even then, however, it was the incredibly rapid extermination of over 300, 000 Hungarian Jews late in the war that raised its total death toll to over a million. By comparison, the three small camps built purely to kill, Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, together murdered a larger number, over 1,700,000.

Rees shows how the evolution of the crazy racist utopian Nazi "resettlement" policies, of Jews, Poles, and Russians, carried out partly to provide territory for ethnic Germans from "Greater Reich" territories like Czechoslovakia, became more radical and ruthless with each passing month. This was especially the case after Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union, dooming many new millions of Jews and Slavs. Hitler and Himmler actively encouraged this radicalism, driving SS officers, like Adolf Eichmann and Rudolf Hoess, the Auschwitz Commandant, to compete in murderous zeal and efficiency. Hoess was no mere functionary, but the maker of major decisions about how the whole system evolved.

In this instance and others, Rees also obliterates the feeble "only following orders" defense so often provided by defeated Nazis. Specific examples demonstrate that the level of cruelty and murderousness varied considerably on an individual basis; for that matter, so did the strength and effectiveness of prisoner resistance. Revealing anecdotes, whether from once-terrified young children or from onetime actual executioners, convey the full horror in a way that the overwhelming statistics of death cannot.

The television series may have the larger immediate impact, but the book probably matters more in the long run, just as it was eventually discovered that the most powerful visual images of war have not come from films, but from striking photographs. English historians, like Niall Ferguson and Simon Schama, have already succeeded in making use of television far more effectively than historians have generally done in the past, and combining this with books that are popularizations, but still pretty good ones. The same can be said of the Rees book. It deserves to be read. It provides at least some answer to what a Sonderkommando wrote in a letter to his wife, shortly before being killed in late 1944:

Dante's hell is incomparably ridiculous in comparison with this real one here, and we are its eye-witnesses and we cannot leave it alive.

NAS10:49 AM