Sturm: Young Should Learn about Crimes of Totalitarian Regimes
Condemning the crimes of totalitarian systems plays an important role in educating new generations, Justice Minister Lovro Sturm said at the annual European Standing Conference of History Teachers' Associations at Bled on Thursday.
It is necessary to confront the past and history teachers are very important in this process, Sturm told the participants of the conference, which was focusing on human rights in the history curriculum.
Slovenia is the only European country that went through three totalitarian systems in the previous century - Fascism, Nacism and Communism. These regimes violated human rights massively and systematically, he explained.
Sturm, who emphasized human rights violations under the communist regime in former Yugoslavia, believes that confronting totalitarianism is also necessary to find a new meaning after such regimes break down.
Systematical human rights violations under the communist regime should be understood as a warning against any kind of totalitarianism, he said.
The fourth day of the conference also saw a lecture by Dina Kiwan of the London Birbeck College, who talked about the importance of education for inclusive citizenship, which is based on the knowledge about identity, history and human rights.
Kiwan explained that such education was especially important nowadays, because the society was in a moral crisis, the young were increasingly politically indifferent and we might be facing a crisis of democracy demonstrated by the low election turnout.
The conference, attended by more than 130 teachers from Europe the US, Canada and Russia, closed on 25 March.
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