Why the "Nazi essay" teacher was wrong (and why he wasn't)

I've been a little uncomfortable with the uproar against the Albany teacher who assigned his students to write a persuasive essay from the Nazi perspective that Jews are evil.  Yes, given our history, the particular conclusion assigned was bound to shed more heat than light no matter how noble the teacher's intentions were, with foreseeable harm to members of the community.  And more broadly, any such assignment is very problematic if not done in a context where the objectives were obvious and there were an entire series of projects through which the students were asked to assume counterintuitive positions.  I also have doubts as to whether such an assignment could be pulled off smoothly with such a young age group.  However, I also agree with Ken Kersh's point that simply asking students to adopt a moral conclusion:

deprives students of a deep understanding of how it is that people can actually hold those views, and still go to church and sleep well at night -- to understand themselves to be doing the right thing. Besides making students shallower people where it comes to understanding history and political and social thought, it make them shallower in the understanding of themselves: only by seeing how odious and unjust ideas issue from sophisticated and powerful logics (typically in conjunction with intense emotions), can they begin to feel the necessity of continually examining themselves, asking how in their own time and place they might be following similar logics and scripts, both time-tested and new. Learning how others think –- including badly -- is a critical part of learning to think effectively themselves.

When I teach our Foundations of Justice course, I ask students to argue both sides of the abortion issue -- not because I want them to conclude that moral truth is in the eye of the beholder, but because I believe that they will be better advocates when they have put themselves in the shoes of those who oppose their views.  Now assigning to high schoolers a proposition that demonizes a religious minority is a much different notion than a case law-driven exercise in advocacy for law students, and so I agree with those who question the high school teacher's prudence in selecting that particular topic, but I'm leery of any emerging tendency to equate categorically the assigned content with the pedagogical objective.