The Genocide Education Project
San Fransisco, California, USA
The Genocide Education Project (GenEd) seeks to assist educators in teaching about human rights and genocide, particularly the Armenian Genocide, by developing and distributing instructional materials, providing access to teaching resources and organizing educational workshops.
The idea for GenEd sprung out of the absence of scholastic instruction about the Armenian Genocide, the systematic extermination of 1.5 million Armenians (half the Armenian population living on its historic homeland) by the Turkish government of the Ottoman Empire in 1915.
Although sometimes referred to as “the forgotten genocide,” the Armenian Genocide is considered by historians as the prototype for genocides which came after it, including the most widely taught genocide, the Holocaust, and others which took the lives of millions of innocent victims.
In order for future generations to be able to combat and prevent the problem of genocide, young people today must better understand its reasons, circumstances, outcomes, and ramifications.
The Genocide Education Project was established in order to broaden the general understanding of the history of the Armenian Genocide, in the context of the history of World War I, and as a predecessor of the pattern of genocides that followed.