When you’re studying History, you are learning about the past and how the world around us came to be. It’s a subject that can be very exciting, and it also holds lessons that can apply to our own lives. Historians will teach you about times of suffering and loss, as well as times of joy and triumph. It’s these moments that help us to find our moral compass and learn what it is to be a human being in this world.
But it’s important to remember that if you only study the history that has been recorded, you will only be seeing part of the picture. Historians often argue about what really happened and why. They try to answer big questions, like: Was there really a Trojan War? Did the Greek poet Homer really describe it correctly? How did people live and work together in the past?
History is not a scientific field, but it is an enterprise that seeks to understand the human world and how it works. As such, it can be a particularly tricky endeavour to navigate – full of the human foibles of jealousy, self-righteousness, pride and vanity. It’s also prone to subconscious obfuscation, or at least the hiding of more grim realities from the public eye.
Despite these challenges, History has a vital role to play in education. Dropping it from the curriculum will leave young people without a sense of identity with the rest of humanity and our place in it. Historians want to help children understand the world in which they live, and they teach them the value of diversity. If we want the future of our planet to be a place where everyone is welcome, it’s essential that we know how people have lived together in the past and learned to respect each other.
The ability to assess and interpret evidence is an invaluable skill to have, whatever you end up doing in life. The study of History allows students to develop this, as they analyse a diverse array of sometimes conflicting data and make reasoned interpretations. It’s a skill that many people will employ in their careers, and one that can be applied to all sorts of information they encounter in their daily lives.
Those who take a cynical view of History, however, are ignoring the fact that it has many practical benefits. It teaches students how to deal with complexity and contradictions, which is an increasingly valuable skill in the modern world. It can also give them a sense of identity as they explore their family’s history and how it has interacted with historical change. This can be a powerful lesson, as it encourages them to question how the world we live in now has come to be so much the way that it is. It also teaches them that, even though the past may seem distant and incomprehensible, we are all part of the same human story.