Let’s face it, our first experience with History is that it is a course that we have to take in order to graduate. As a junior and senior high school student we are confronted with American history, state history and perhaps even a general course in western civilization or world history. We didn’t have a choice. And the fact that we are forced to take history puts us on the offensive. We begin to build that grandiose brick wall that will prevent us from getting anything important out of history.
The main problem as I see it, is not history itself. The study of history can be fun. But there’s only one thing that can make our first experience with history a miserable thing indeed: and that’s a poor instructor. I was fortunate. I managed to have a number of excellent history instructors throughout my high school years and this was at a time when I was leaning toward the physical sciences, geology and biology to be exact. I might not have been an excellent history student, but I do remember having excellent history teachers.
Fine. That’s my experience. But experience aside, why study history in the first place? What could history offer the business major? the student intending to study web page development? the student taking her first psychology class? or pre-med student? or the lawyer? or the worker on the shop floor? Well, simply stated, everything has a history, whether we like it or not. Even history itself has a history. Try hard as we might, we can’t escape the past. We can’t let go of the past. And we celebrate the past all the time.
You may have been told that we study history so that we won’t repeat the mistakes of the past. This is the wishful thinking school of historical interpretation. It’s too clean. If we have learned from the past then over the centuries we ought to have accumulated so much knowledge that things like war, poverty, injustice and immorality ought not to exist. Of course, we’ve still got a long way to go in this respect.
June 23rd, 2012 at 12:02 pm
Hi there, I actually stopped taking history at school in the UK when I was 16, then went on to study it at university. The school covered WW2 twice, the 2nd time (from 16-18yrs) in more detail. The most amazing parts of history for me were that they taught critical thinking and empathy. Thinking about how the past is represented by its author helps in everyday life – modern application -is what Fox news says the truth? Getting inside the mind of someone from the past and imagining how tough it must’ve been really helped me to do this in other situations.
Great blog post, thanks for making me think about why I love history again, although I agree that the way it was presented at school could’ve been much more engaging!