To be honest when I was at school I’ve never liked studying, especially History.
Unfortunately I think that this is a very common thing that most of the students agree on. Imagine coming back from school and you have to study twenty (or more) history pages for the next day, quite annoying.
But now that I finished school, I’m getting interested in History. How is it possible? Well, I understood the importance of the subject.
In my opinion at school most of the teachers don’t teach this subject correctly, in fact they follow the program, but they don’t explain why this subject is studied and why it is so important.
History is important because is the memory of our ancestors, and shows us how they faced life. In fact we don’t even have to think (and it would be crazy) to forget what happened, because history is something cyclic.
So if you are struggling with something and you don’t know how to get out, I won’t say that history always gives us an answer, but for sure it can help a lot.
Probably you also heard about the phrase “History is important to do not commit the same mistakes of the past” for some of you it can be a chant and obvious but apparently it isn’t (just think about what is happening in the world right now) nations that from victims become tortures, but this is another story. Let’s go back at our phrase, History is a succession of choices, and also the smallest can have a really big impact on the future. An example can be the assassination of Francis Ferdinand that brought at the beginning of the two world wars:
the first one was a direct cause, while the second world war was a need of retaliation (of the Germans and Italians) from the loss and for the terms never respected (“mutilate victory”).
So what I’m trying to say is that to understand what is going on right now we have to study what happened in the past, because if we don’t we will make, for sure, the same choices that brought at the death of millions of people.
Here there are only few examples of what history can teach:
When you study history, you understand how the much acclaimed “National Pride” is only a social scourge, that still now is killing people only because they were born in the “wrong side” of the world.
You will understand that apparently there is a big difference between black and white, rich and poor or even straight and homosexual and much more…
With this I want you to understand that you don’t have to commit my same mistake of not studying this subject or studying it because there is the test tomorrow, but because it gives you the possibility of understand the world and being independent, because I can ensure you that being independent from other’s thinking, is one of our most powerful way to be free.
Sources
https://www.mooc.org/blog/why-is-it-important-to-study-history