French President Nicolas Sarkozy has dropped a proposal for Holocaust remembrance that would have seen 10-year-olds learn the life stories of children killed by the Nazis, a former minister said Wednesday.
   
Sarkozy had set off an outcry from Jewish activists, psychologists and leftwing politicians earlier this month when he made the proposal in an address to French Jewish leaders.
   
The government will explore other avenues to "encourage children in classrooms to look at, not other children in particular, but rather a given situation in a given city," said former minister Simone Veil, a Holocaust survivor who had criticised the proposal.
   
Under the original plan, every schoolchild was to be given the name of a Jewish deportee and tasked with investigating the family, surroundings and the circumstances in which the child disappeared.
   
Critics called the proposal misguided, saying it could stir up resentment among other sectors of society and be traumatic for young children.
   
Veil herself had assailed the proposal as "unimaginable, unbearable and unjust," saying 10-year-olds should not have to identify with dead children.
   
She had later agreed to join a task force put together by Education Minister Xavier Darcos to look at the proposal more closely.
   
Following a meeting with the education ministry on Wednesday, Veil said "nothing specific has been decided but we all want to improve on what is already being well done by teachers."
   
Some 11,500 children died in the Holocaust among the 75,000 Jews who were deported in World War II. Nearly all died in the extermination camps at Auschwitz and elsewhere.
   
A number of French schools today bear plaques at their entrance describing the number of former students sent to concentration camps and where many died.