State lawmakers are set to take up two bills in January that would change what New Hampshire students learn about genocide.
One bill would require instruction on genocide’s impact on people with disabilities. The other seeks to clarify that the Holocaust, the only genocide currently named in the state’s curriculum requirements, is one of several acts of mass destruction through history.
“I knew growing up that the word ‘genocide’ was synonymous with the Holocaust,” said Rep. Ellen Read, the Newmarket Democrat behind the second bill. “We did not talk about other things like the extermination of Indigenous people in North America. That leads people to think that our history is a little cleaner than it is.”
Read said her concern is that without a wider understanding of genocide, students won’t understand that genocide continues.
“I want to teach that it’s things like death marches and controlling reproduction,” Read said. “It’s thinks like systematic rape. There’s almost this sense that we are past that, that we have evolved, that we are more civilized. We have not evolved. We are not more civilized.”
Lawmakers made instruction about genocide and the Holocaust mandatory for New Hampshire students in grades 8 through 12 in 2020. That same year, the Legislature created the Commission on Holocaust and Genocide Education to help guide the new curriculum.
The law defines genocide as acts intended to destroy a group, including by killing members, inflicting serious physical or mental harm on them, preventing births, or transferring children from one group to another group.
A year after passing that law, lawmakers banned the teaching of discrimination, including systemic racism and implicit bias. Educators said they felt caught in the middle, unsure how to teach students about the beliefs that led to genocides without talking about systemic racism.
The American Civil Liberties Union, National Education Association, American Federation of Teachers, and other educators challenged the divisive concepts law in federal court. In May, the court struck down the law as unconstitutionally vague.
The state is appealing. Meanwhile, Democrats have filed draft legislation that would repeal the law. With Republicans holding supermajorities in both chambers of the Legislature in 2025, as well as the governor’s office, that proposal seems unlikely to pass.