To some people studying the past has little value in the modern world. Why do you think it is important to do so? What will be the effect if children are not taught history?

My Essay

(266 words, not revised yet)

People have different views about the role of studying the past. While there are some bad arguments in favour of it to be less valuable to our contemporary world, I suppose that it is vital to encourage individuals to study history. More importantly, there will be many negative impacts on our society if children are not taught history.

It is clearly seen that studying history has several benefits. The main benefit is that history offers a warehouse of information about how people and societies function. Hence, through studying historical periods, individuals and organisations can be given insights into various aspects of life, such as, the influence of technological innovations, the role that religion plays in society’s operation, or the development of different civilisations. Another advantage of history is that it provides an extensive evidential base whereby we might analyse change and find many explanations for the situations we confront today.

However, it is safe to say that our society can be severely affected if children are discouraged from studying history. Specifically, a citizen without fundamental knowledge of national history is more unlikely to understand national values and a commitment of national loyalty. As a result, a country which has such citizens will possibly be in danger when it faces the real diplomatic complexities. In addition, it cannot be denied that children can easily repeat the past mistakes in the future if they are not taught the past violence.

In conclusion, I would argue that studying history has many positive effects nowadays, and it is crucial for history to be placed more emphasis in all educational settings.

First of all, I think that there is something to the old truism that we study history so that we don’t make the same mistakes that others in the past have made.  For example, by studying the role of women in past cultures, we can come to understand how we can make the lives of women in our own period different (and hopefully better!) than that of their forebears.  If we do not know the trials and tribulations that women faced in the past, then we cannot hope to avoid making the same mistakes when we set out to implement policies and legislation that affects them in the contemporary period.

However, studying the past also provides us a window into other modes of experience.  Certainly, we can never, absolutely, an completely enter in the minds of those that have come before, but we can, I would argue, get a glimpse of what life was like for them.  By researching, by looking at the documents, and even by reading contemporary historical fiction, we can gain a valuable glimpse into the lives of other people.  In doing so, we can also come to know a great deal about ourselves, about the mechanics and the processes and the systems that underlie our own culture and our own ways of making sense of the world.  In doing so, it can be hoped, we can also gain a fuller sense of our own identity.

Finally, by studying history we can get a fuller, deeper, more complex sense of our own development as a species.  Studying history can both be a time for pleasurable contemplation of our accomplishments, but it can also be a time for meditating on the past injustices, and how those have shaped the world that we have come to inhabit today.  All too often people assume that history is something that has happened in the past, that the actions of people hundreds of years in the past can have no bearing on the present and its inhabitants (a truism that many people use to defend themselves against encroachments or any kind of complaints from oppressed groups).  However, that is most definitely not the case.  The doings of the past and its people have very powerful and indelible influences upon us, though we might like to pretend that they do not.  Only by recognizing these effects, and by understanding how those things came to happen, can we have any hope of creating a more just and peaceful world.  Otherwise, we are doomed to endlessly repeat the ancient cycles and mistakes of the past.