N.Y. Times: PARIS — President Nicolas Sarkozy dropped an intellectual bombshell this week, surprising the nation and touching off waves of protest with his revision of the school curriculum: beginning next fall, he said, every fifth grader will have to learn the life story of one of the 11,000 French children killed by the Nazis in the Holocaust.Nothing is more moving, for a child, than the story of a child his own age, who has the same games, the same joys and the same hopes as he, but who, in the dawn of the 1940s, had the bad fortune to be defined as a Jew,” Mr. Sarkozy said at the end of a dinner speech to France’s Jewish community on Wednesday night. He added that every French child should be “entrusted with the memory of a French child-victim of the Holocaust.”

I was really intrigued when reading this article.  I like the idea of bringing history into reality for students.  The truth is, we do sugar coat history and by doing so we don’t really get a feel for what certain people went through.  By doing this project, thje child will relate his/her life to those of the children who went through the Holocaust.  By seeing that they were just normal kids who liked to play games, hang out with their friends, etc they can truely get an idea of what thathorrible time must have been like.

It is also important to connect kids to history because, unfortunately, history tends to repeat itself.  If we do not understand what we have come from we will never be able to understand where we are going.  It is important that students see what can come of hate and prejudice and how wrong what happened was.  It was a real event, with real people and they need to understand that.