DP19575 Learning from the Past: How History Education Shapes Support for Extreme Ideology
Can teaching the history of authoritarian regimes built on extreme ideology lastingly reduce support for those ideologies? We examine this question by leveraging a natural experiment in a large German state where the senior high school history curriculum exogenously alternated covering, across cohorts, the communist German Democratic Republic and fascist Nazi Germany. Survey data collected around twelve years post-graduation from over 2,000 former students reveals that studying the GDR rather than the Nazi regime increases knowledge about the GDR (by 0.19 sd units) and reduces support for extreme left-wing ideology (by 0.10 sd units). Such treatment does not increase support for extreme right-wing ideology, except in more right-leaning regions.
