Compulsory Reading

I've been marking scripts from the May IB examinations for something like a week now and come across one or two essays featuring work by Primo Levi. It's good to see schools prepared to take on material of this magnitude and depth, but it's oddly disturbing to try and apply the fairly mechanical process of marking to material that sees students encountering something close to the unsayable. Thank goodness  there were those who survived the horrors of the Holocaust and found a way of saying something about it.

It seems to me that every child who attends school at secondary level everywhere in the world should study at least one text that deals head-on with the appalling cruelty of which we are capable. There's a moral imperative not to protect our children from this knowledge.