Nearly 33 percent of students in elementary and high schools in the United States and Canada who participated in a new survey said they weren’t sure if the Holocaust happened, or if it did, they thought it was “exaggerated or fabricated.”
Almost 3,600 North American students from grades six through 12 participated in the study commissioned by the Ontario-based organization Liberation75, though 78.6 percent of the respondents were Canadian. The findings of the survey were released on Wednesday, one day before International Holocaust Remembrance Day
“I think that the study is so important in an age of misinformation and disinformation,” said Alexis Lerner from Western University, who led the study. “When students aren’t getting Holocaust information and genocide information in the schools, they’re not getting fact-based information. And so they’re turning to these alternative sources of information.”
No Canadian province or territory requires Holocaust education as part of their secondary-school curricula. In the United States, 22 states mandate Holocaust education in secondary schools, according to Liberation75.
The survey also questioned students about their knowledge of Jews and anti-Semitism.