Teaching Zach to Think
E x PA N d I N G T H E B O U N dA R I E S O F L E A R N I N G
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NOvEMBERLEARNING.COM
Teaching Zack to Think by Alan November
NOTE: This article was originally written in 1998 and contains many outdated links. For the sake of keeping the story accurate and intact, we are leaving the links as originally written. To view any nonworking sites, paste their URLs into the Wayback Machine found at http://www.archive.org. Is your high school teaching students to access the Internet for research? Then it is essential that students also learn how to validate the information. The Internet is a place where you can find “proof” of essentially any belief system that you can imagine. And, for too many students, “If it is on the Internet, it is true.” The following story is also true. Fourteen year old: “I’m working on a history paper about how the Holocaust never happened.” Long pause. “Zack, where did you hear that the Holocaust didn’t happen?” “The Internet. It’s on a Web page at Northwestern University.” Zack found his “information” from a Web page at http://pubweb.acns.nwu.edu/~abutz/index.html, Home Web page of Arthur R. Butz. On his low-key home page, Butz explains that he wrote “A short introduction to the study of Holocaust revisionism” and that his material is intended for “advanced students of Holocaust revisionism.” At the top of the page Butz identifies himself as “Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Northwestern University.” His article begins with the following: I see three principal reasons for the widespread but erroneous belief in the legend of millions of Jews killed by the Germans during World War II: US and British troops found horrible piles of corpses in the west German camps they captured in 1945..., there are no longer large communities of Jews in Poland,
C R E AT I v E CO M M O N S AT T R I B U T I O N - N O N CO M M E R C I A L- S H A R E A L I k E 3 . 0 U N I T E d S TAT E S L I C E N S E
and historians generally
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NOvEMBERLEARNING.COM
Teaching Zack to Think by Alan November
NOTE: This article was originally written in 1998 and contains many outdated links. For the sake of keeping the story accurate and intact, we are leaving the links as originally written. To view any nonworking sites, paste their URLs into the Wayback Machine found at http://www.archive.org. Is your high school teaching students to access the Internet for research? Then it is essential that students also learn how to validate the information. The Internet is a place where you can find “proof” of essentially any belief system that you can imagine. And, for too many students, “If it is on the Internet, it is true.” The following story is also true. Fourteen year old: “I’m working on a history paper about how the Holocaust never happened.” Long pause. “Zack, where did you hear that the Holocaust didn’t happen?” “The Internet. It’s on a Web page at Northwestern University.” Zack found his “information” from a Web page at http://pubweb.acns.nwu.edu/~abutz/index.html, Home Web page of Arthur R. Butz. On his low-key home page, Butz explains that he wrote “A short introduction to the study of Holocaust revisionism” and that his material is intended for “advanced students of Holocaust revisionism.” At the top of the page Butz identifies himself as “Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Northwestern University.” His article begins with the following: I see three principal reasons for the widespread but erroneous belief in the legend of millions of Jews killed by the Germans during World War II: US and British troops found horrible piles of corpses in the west German camps they captured in 1945..., there are no longer large communities of Jews in Poland,
C R E AT I v E CO M M O N S AT T R I B U T I O N - N O N CO M M E R C I A L- S H A R E A L I k E 3 . 0 U N I T E d S TAT E S L I C E N S E
and historians generally