The Mid South Minority Education Council (MSMEC) provides educators with curriculum tools to instruct students in critical thinking, prejudice reduction, and personal responsibility. Using the Holocaust-era history of persecuted minority groups, such as Jehovah’s Witnesses, MSMEC materials and presentations examine key questions, including:

1. Why and how did the Nazi regime attempt to suppress nonviolent resistance?

2. What could ordinary people have done to defy Nazi terror?

3. What motivated those few resisters to risk death to maintain their nonviolent and life-affirming values?

By exploring Nazi coercion ranging from peer pressure to official persecution, students draw parallels in their own life experience. Without advocating or promoting religious belief, these compelling historical discussions help young people ponder their response to prejudice, negative peer pressure, and destructive behavior by sharpening their ethics and values, voice of conscience, and sense of personal responsibility.

 Every young person today faces a variety of dilemmas in his or her life. For example: When do I go along with others, and when do I stand up for what I believe in? Is it possible to maintain conviction in the face of threat of serious harm? Is it worth it? Does the law of conscience and human decency ever overrule national law or ‘the law of the jungle’? If so, when?

Look at the accompanying picture.

 What do you see? Did you notice very few of these young people were willing to stand out and be different and listen to their conscience? Why? What did the man pictured, Hitler, want people to do and how did he terrify them into doing it? What would you have done if you had been put in this situation?

You have been put in the very same situation! And we can use their experiences and comments to determine the ‘right thing to do’ when dealing with:

 

ISSUES SUCH AS: