When I first heard about the new Facing History and Ourselves course my sophomore year, I could not wait to take it. Something that few people know about me is that I have an absolute passion for history. The reason that not many people know this is because my passion does not always come out in school history courses, which for the most part are cut-and-dry courses in fact memorization. Although these classes are still interesting to me, they do not inspire the same depth of thought or personal attachment as I have with Facing History. This is because Facing History transcends this standard and incorporates personal thoughts, reflections, and opinions. In my AP English class, we are taught that the important thing to analyze when we write is not what happened, but how this connects to a deeper meaning. This epitomizes the Facing History and Ourselves course. We are taught what happened, but it doesn’t end there. We then go on to analyze how things happened and how this affected the people of that time. We students are encouraged to speak our minds about everything we think in this class, which I feel makes us learn much more. We are not just given a piece of information and told what to think about it. We are given information on a topic and then we go on to hear what each of our classmates thinks about it. In this way, we eliminate bias from the course and are able to learn what really happened. In this way also, we are able to see how different people’s thoughts can be on the same topic. This is what makes Facing History such an important class to me. I think that that is what history is supposed to be. Facts and dates are important because of the lessons they teach, not just in and of themselves. The number two on its own means nothing. It is only when something is applied to it, like two dollars, or apples for example, that the number two has a real meaning. I feel that history is much the same. You can know who the president is and when their term of office was, but if you don’t know how they acted, what their policies were, how the country prospered in relation to those policies, etc., you really don’t know much. This is what I like about Facing History and Ourselves. We don’t just learn the facts, we learn why they matter.
Some of the things that stuck with me the most over the year were some of the things I’ve seen the most. I have seen countless liberations of concentration camps yet the burning image is really never any less powerful. To really see the evil that went on and to wonder how people let that happen is one of the most haunting and troubling questions that I have ever faced in my life. It is the primary documents that stick with me the most. The real footage. Hollywood certainly makes things look better and has better quality film and more invigorating scripts, however there is nothing that can quite stand up to the real thing.
Facing History relies heavily on movies to teach us the information, and to be honest, I have seen most of the films we watched this year beforehand, on my own time. However, through this class and the open forum it provides, I took away a much more powerful message from each of these films. I was able to relate to the people in the films, I could feel what they felt, and in this way I took away a lot more from these films than I could have in any other way. As I said before, history means a lot to me, and I honestly believe it should me mandatory to take for every student, as it teaches so much. Although its main focus is on the Holocaust, I have seen changes in my classmate’s daily lives from participating in this course. It changes the way people think. I have talked to many of my peers (some of whom don’t really care for history at all and took the class because they heard it had no tests), and what I hear is all the same. I hear that like me, people were able to place themselves in the time and circumstances, and came away from the class with a stinging, undeniable, sense of citizenship. Sure, we learn what you would expect from a Holocaust course, but that’s not what makes it so important. What makes it important is that we look at who the Nazis were, how they came to power, how they were able to execute their goals, how they were able to get away with it, why they targeted who they did, why this was acceptable, how the victims were treated, how the victims felt in response to this, etc. This is what gives the course its power. By discussing all of this, we learn history in a modern context. One cannot help but apply themselves to these materials. One cannot help but think, “What would I have done if I was a young boy living in Germany, surrounded by propaganda in this time?” This is what gives the Facing History and Ourselves course its power. By forcing students to relate to the information, we truly learn it. We feel it as a part of ourselves and it causes it to stick with us in all aspects of life. This is how Facing History makes people better citizens, because by taking the class, people realize when they make a racist comment, and what the implications of that are. This power, this overwhelming wealth of learning material rather than memorizing it is what Facing History means to me. It is about changing the way you think, about learning things that will stick with you for the rest of your life and make you a better person.