Assessing the Impact of Holocaust Education on Adolescents’ Civic Values: Experimental Evidence from Arkansas

In this project, we study the potential benefits of Holocaust education programming on high school students’ civic values.  This study is motivated by the belief that studying periods of history in which civic values were tested can help shape or strengthen those values in students, a belief held by many history scholars and teachers.  Despite this theory of Holocaust education’s benefits, few states mandate any form of Holocaust education, and a recent survey of Holocaust knowledge and awareness reveals low levels of knowledge of basic facts of the Holocaust among U.S. adults.  We evaluate the Arkansas Holocaust Education Conference to understand if such interventions have benefits for adolescents’ civic values.