History is more than some dusty discipline that sits in a dark corner of a library nobody ever visits. It’s an active, important endeavor that has the power to transform lives and shape a better future. This is why every modern nation encourages schools to teach it in some form.
People’s deepest beliefs and convictions about how the past does or should affect the world they live in are at the heart of what makes history such a complicated enterprise. It’s a messy business that is more susceptible than other subjects to self-righteousness, pride, vanity and – at the very least – subconscious obfuscation of some grimmer truths.
It’s also a difficult subject because there is no one, uncontested source of truth. Even with all the technical skills available to a historian, it’s impossible to be certain about what really happened in the past. It’s much like trying to determine the truth of a car accident by comparing eyewitness accounts. And just as it’s possible to interpret a brief event in thousands of different ways, so too is it possible for one historical figure or period to be viewed in a variety of different ways by various historians and students of history.
But despite its difficulty, history is a fascinating and important subject because it helps to understand the nature of human behavior and the way in which it changes over time. Historians can show how past patterns of behavior have shaped current ones and how we can avoid repeating some of the mistakes that have been made in the past.
It helps to explain how a society or civilization functions in order to be able to evaluate it in terms of its successes and failures and make plans for the future. This is an extremely valuable skill for people in any job, but it’s especially helpful in a position of leadership, whether at the local level or in an international community.
Besides being an essential component of good citizenship, which all modern nations recognize as a vital goal, history also gives people the identities that help them feel part of a community and a country. Whether it’s studying their family history or learning about the heroic acts of others who have changed the course of history, people use history to create systems of values that define their attitudes towards other people and the world they live in.
It teaches us about freedom and equality, struggle and success, courage and loss, and so many other aspects of life that are invaluable to our existence on this planet. And it can inspire people to achieve their own dreams, regardless of the obstacles. It takes nothing short of a hero from the pages of history to light up children’s imaginations and spur them on to great things. And that’s why people need history, even if they don’t realize it. They need to know who they are and how they got where they are today.