Importance of History: The Memories That Keep Us

By Steven Wright

Why does every high school student seem to hate history? And those who don’t are looked at as if they are some sort of segmented bug-alien?

 “History is pretty much useless, its not gonna help us at all,” said Robert Weil 11.

I’m here to change your mind, and wash your brain of those foolish notions that the past means nothing to the future and implement a brave new world in the mindscapes of your psyche.

If you’re like most, when you think of history, you think of powdered wigs, old dead guys, and irrelevant times and dates that you were forced to remember for some test. What often slips our minds is that yesterday was history too.

 Our childhood was history. The events that shaped us yesterday, the day before and all the way back to our very birth, have a direct correlation to the choices we will make in the future. But how, do those events shape us?

Well my reader, they shape us because we learned and we remembered. You know not to touch a hot stove because you may have been burnt by one in the past and that knowledge of history keeps you safe now.

The founding fathers set up a democratic government because the tyranny of England was still fresh in their minds. It’s all the same concept. You may be thinking “I remember things just fine, but I’m just reading an outdated textbook.”

You would be right in thinking that if we had some sort of pooled collective intelligence stored in some ethereal warehouse of rainbows in the sky, easily accessed by anyone with a keyboard.

 But no, a person’s knowledge dies with them, so the only way to pass on what a one knows is the written word. Without history books, humanity would have never advanced because every generation would be relearning everything that the previous generations had already been through.

It is because our fathers built that foundation of knowledge, passed on to us their experiences of trial and error that we can build the platform for our children to stand, taking humanity ever higher into the future.