The purpose is not to try to list why the holocaust is good, it isn’t obviously, but I can think of at least two exercises where this is useful for a fourth grade class. 1) to use an extreme example, likely the worst in the world’s history, to make it hard or impossible to find positives is harder to think. 2) to try to better understand the terrible situation and monsters that led to the holocaust. Empathizing with psychopaths is important for society to not repeat issues. So trying to find “good” issues may help understand why such evil was perpetrated.
Of course the framing is extremely important and can’t be understood by OP’s post and likely not by ththe tv headline. But my frustration is that people immediately not only judge, but make their judgements widely known, without an understanding deep enough to judge.
Of course, the assignment could have been a horrible facade over racism. I don’t know. I went to middle school in the south and we had a lot of class work trying to excuse slavery on the side. But just based on the headline, I don’t know. And having a headline of “might be racist” is a waste of time. If I could trust media to investigate and only report if it is racism, then that would be great. But as is, I cannot, and it’s much more likely the purpose is to generate views and ad revenue even though there is no story there.
Thus making us all dumber.