Asking children to re-enact such controversial scenarios from history is hardly an ideal method of teaching. If anything, it is a lazy method of teaching that relies on poor play-acting, the trivialization of actual historic events, and often a resulting misunderstanding of these events.
How much do you think children learn about historic slavery, while giggling over placing a dollar amount on the heads of some of their classmates, whom they have been given the authority to humiliate? Granted, there may be some children in the classroom who grasp the teacher's intentions, but I'm willing to bet that the majority of children in any typical, public school classroom are more likely going to exhibit the immaturity that is generally found in their age group.
Here's another example of the pitfalls of play-acting controversial subjects in the classroom: There are teachers who have thought it was clever to teach children about the Holocaust by giving half the class the assignment of presenting arguments on behalf of the Nazi side, stating Hitler's "good intentions." (The most infamous of these assignments took place in a high school in upstate New York and was the subject of
author Liza Wiemer's book The Assignment). Almost universally, these school assignments have backfired due to a number of students sincerely and enthusiastically preaching to their fellow students that Jews deserved to die in the Holocaust. I don't know whether such outcomes may have been the intention of some of these teachers but, even if their intentions were innocent, the results were appalling to say the least.
I don't agree that all such teachers should automatically be fired on account of misguided intentions. However, I do believe that some naive teachers need to be taught, themselves, the difference between destructive and instructive teaching methods.
