William Diamond was a young drummer in the Lexington militia when he stood on the town green before dawn on April 19, 1775, and beat the call that summoned his neighbors to assemble. The middle school that bears his name in Lexington, Massachusetts, exists, like every school, to do a version of what he did: to sound a summons, to ready the next generation for the hard things that citizenship asks. Not long ago it did the opposite.
After a class of seventh graders sat through a lesson connecting the Holocaust to the antisemitism still around them, some families complained. The lesson, they said, had left their children feeling “unseen,” their communities “left out or erased,” the session leaving them “less safe, not more.” And so the principal, Dr. Johnny Cole, wrote to the students to apologize. He had “missed the mark.” He promised to build something better at his school: a curriculum about hate and prejudice in general, one that would “include all of our communities and all of our histories.”
Read that last phrase slowly, because it is the whole story.
The Holocaust is not a unit in a comparative survey of grievances. It is not one history among many, to be balanced against the others so that every child leaves the room feeling equally represented. It was a dark moment in human history and it happened; full stop. Six million Jews were murdered by a modern state that organized its bureaucracy, its industry, and its science around their extermination. To teach that truthfully is not to slight anyone else. It is simply to teach it. The Nazis murdered others too - Roma, the disabled, Soviet prisoners - and honest teaching says so. But the Lexington families were not asking that those victims be remembered. They were asking to be centered themselves. A lesson about the murder of Europe’s Jews is under no obligation to make room for that.
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