On Friday the 8th grade had a visitor from Facing History and Ourselves. The 8th grade is reading “Night” by Elie Wiesel and learning about the Holocaust. A common thought we have when we learn about the Holocaust is “Why did the German people allow these terrible atrocities to happen?”

This lesson takes a look at what obedience means and why people are obedient. It uses a study conducted at Yale in the 1960’s by Stanley Milgram. Volunteers came in and were paid $4 to participate in the study. They were “teachers” and they had to conduct a multiple choice quiz with a “student” that they couldn’t see. If the student got the question wrong the teacher was required to give the student a shock voltage that started at 15 volts and steadily increased with each wrong answer to over 400 volts. The voltages were fake and the “student” was actually just a voice recording done by an actor. But the teacher did not know this, and it seemed like they were severely hurting the individual with each increased shock voltage.

Over 65% of the teachers (volunteers for the study) complied with the study and went up to the highest voltage on the student. This was much higher than most people would assume. So this is a great thing to consider when we think about what may have happened with the Germans during WWII.

You can find the entire lesson plan on obedience here.

One question I am left with- I would love to interview the people after they finished the experiment to see why they decided to stop or finish the procedure. What was their thought process that led them to think it was ok to go to the highest voltage?

Facing History has a lot of great curriculum and resources for Social Studies classrooms. Be sure to take a look.