Introduction

My name is Ari Lazarine and I'm a Junior at Westborough High School.  This year I had the once in a lifetime opportunity of taking a course called Facing History and Ourselves.  As a sophomore, I had heard about the course through word of mouth and through my teachers at my synagogue.  I really didn't understand the full scope of the course but from I did understand I was thrilled that it was being offered to Juniors because I would get the chance to take a course about the world before I made my decision on what I was going to do after high school rather than take a bunch of classes that I probably wouldn't ever use again in my life. 

The objective of Facing History and Ourselves is to try and answer one question: “Who are you”.  Such a simple question cannot be answered so simply however.  In order to find this answer, the course takes you on a journey through history, specifically the events that led up to World War II and the Holocaust.  Through primary documents from the era, films made during the 40s and 50s as well as contemporary films, the course gives you something called civic agency.  Civic Agency is the ability to look at events in the context of when they happened, not through the lens of today. Once the students have attained civic agency, they can be put onto the streets of Berlin and into Auschwitz so that they may be able to understand how Hitler and the Nazis were able to commit such heinous crimes against humanity. Only then can the question, “Who are you”, be answered.