The Importance of Studying History

Finding the Patterns Honestly and Without Bias

“When I was in school, I hated history,” is the response I receive when I inform people I teach that discipline. Most of the time I laugh and respond with, “That’s because you didn’t have me for a teacher.” Hubris, yes, but truthful nonetheless because unlike so many history teachers, I relate history via stories which connect the names, dates, and places, along with preaching the continual narrative of the human existence. Many hand out worksheets.

It is that narrative, the “find the pattern” approach that not only keeps students interested, but makes history relevant to their lives. As I am fond of remarking during the class period, “History without relevancy is little more than a game of Jeopardy.” It is the connections which matter, being able to see the entire picture that reveals the human tapestry of existence.

Think about becoming lost. How does one become “unlost”? Kids in class often say, “I’d check my GPS,”  eliciting a giggle from the crowd.

I respond with, “Ok, but what happens if you’re in an area with no signal? Now, you’re really lost…what do you do?”

After some contemplation, a student will chime in and say, “I’d retrace my steps to find out where I came from.”

“Exactly. Retrace your steps…see where you went wrong, and then, make the correction to get you on the right path.”

Sounds like a simple explanation, an easy thing to do. Often, people refuse to take the most logical path to a cure. They wander aimlessly searching for answers or trying to come up with an innovative way to solve the problem at hand when all they really need to do is backtrack - study history.

History doesn’t lie; the people that tell it do, and therein lies the problem. History can be interpreted, but interpretation is nothing other than revision, spin, and cultivating a chosen narrative to foster the point of view a story teller wishes to push. Make it sound great, put bows and ribbons on it, and fashion the clay of history to the target audience and you’ve done it; created a narrative with just enough truth to make it seem not only plausible but actual, even thought it’s not.

Because something sounds or feels logical does not make it right. Despite what you see, the sun does not rise in the east and set in the west. In fact, the sun doesn’t move at all.

History must be taught in the Rankean method - just the facts and only the facts. Only then can we begin to breathe life into the phrase by Santayana often quoted (Those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it). The fact is we repeat it all the time but not becuase we don’t study history, it’s that we ignore it thinking our time is somehow superior and we, somehow greater than those who came before us.

We may be technologically better, and maybe even “smarter” in that we know more about the world around us, but history is also created by human beings and human beings, while at times unpredictable individually, tend to have patters as a group (nations). Those patters are difficult to break, the suggestion being they don’t break. Nations and civilizations rise and fall for many of the same reasons, their populations blinded by leaders who commit the same errors of the past, their populations kept ignorant either willingly or through censorship to mask repeated errors that lead to the eventual fall.

This is why the discipline of history is referred to as social science.

We must become better stewards of history. We must challenge those who wish to distort the telling of it for their own means. We must confront the truth and relate our history honestly and without bias; the good and the bad. We must teach our youth to respect their history, to honor it and to study it so as to reveal its patterns.

We must insist on reading those of the past, all of the voices in our collective memory. They have so much to say but because of our vanity, we ignore our ancestors. They clambor to be heard, the dusty pages of their narratives sitting upon old shelves waiting to be opened so they can reveal their secrets to us, shaking their heads as their words go unread.

We must teach history honestly with all of the gold brocade and warts that accompany all civilizations and times, knowing the present cannot and should not judge the past based on our perception of their misdeeds. Times change and so do standards of societal behavior. To hold past societies accountable for their history by our standards is to condemn the past of all peoples to the fiery depths of human judgement; a judgement that will lead us to perditions flames as well. There is no escaping the judgement of the past by the present, all will be found guilty and all will be sentenced.

History must be taught in context and it must be taught truthfully so as to allow it to revel its true self so that we can benefit from its lessons.