The Museum of Tolerance brought its mobile experience to Westview High School on Thursday to help students learn how to combat hate and bias.
As each group of students filed into the mobile classroom, they saw firsthand how propaganda led ordinary people to commit horrible acts. One of the pieces of propaganda the students saw was the painting "In the Begining was the Word" by Hermann Otto Hoyer, showing Adolf Hitler addressing an early Nazi meeting.
It portrayed Hitler as a quasi-messianic figure.
"This is a glorified version of one of the first meetings that Hitler held after World War I," said Ewa Geisler, the Mobile Museum of Tolerance workshop facilitator. "All of these people, they're looking to him because he's telling them that he's going to restore Germany."
The topic of the day was "The Power of Ordiniary People," especially when they're influenced to commit atrocities.
"This is a Holocaust workshop," she told the students as she showed them various propaganda that was used to sow hate during Nazi Germany and the effects it had on people.
Students come out of the experience with a better understanding of how things like the Holocaust could happen and how easy it is for history to repeat itself, Geisler said.
“It's important for these students to understand that we all, or ordinary and we all can affect others with the choices that we make today,” she said.
That experience was eye-opening for 10th-grader Gabe Lee, seeing what caused the Holocaust.
"It showed us that it was all entirely made up of ordinary people," he said. "They weren't crazy or anything. It was just what they saw and they believed.”
His classmate Malia Meng said she sees a lot of parallels between what happened then and today's political climate.
"I feel like there's a lot of political worshiping going on nowadays, too, towards specific people," she said. "And it's just a little worrying."
One of the museum's goals is to provide students with resources for dealing with online hate and misinformation.
Student Fallon Allshire said she's seeing a lot of her classmates fall for things posted online. "There's actually a lot of students in my AP World History class who are very uninformed," she said. "It's very prevalent with a lot of high school students, especially with the rise of social media and how things can be skewed."
The Mobile Museum of Tolerance began in 2020 during the pandemic, and now it travels to schools across the state to present workshops on identifying and combating hatred in today's world.
A recent study by the California Commission on the state of Hate shows that compared to adults, teens are more than twice as likely to experience hate. With hate and division on the rise, the museum said it's important to teach students to spot bias and think critically.
“Because of the internet, information spread so quickly," 10th-grader Aiden Lee said. "And it's very easy to just believe what you see. So I think it's really important for people to fact-check the information that they hear.”
As the students head back to their classroom, learning to think critically about the information shared online may be the most important lesson they learned from the mobile museum experience.
