Facing History and Ourselves (FHAO) is an interdisciplinary moral education program that uses the case study of the Holocaust and World War II to develop middle and high school students' critical thinking abilities, trying to help students make connections between this history and current issues of prejudice, racism, and hatred. In the spring of the 1993-94 school year, FHAO conducted a pilot study of an eighth-grade program implementation in a mid-Atlantic urban school district. The study evaluated increases in students' historical knowledge and their ability to make connections between historical events and current issues. Sixty-four students from two predominantly African American classes, one class receiving the FHAO intervention and the other serving as a control group participated. The experimental group showed a significantly greater gain in historical knowledge of the period, based on responses to matching test items and short-answer questions, although the quality of answers varied greatly. FHAO students also showed a significantly greater increase in general items addressing issues such as reasoning about human relationships and the implications of one's actions, but their opinions remained tied to their personal experiences rather than their historical knowledge. Implications for program design and implementation are discussed. Two tables present survey findings. An appendix contains the pretest and posttest student surveys. (SLD)