First, history provides a storehouse of information about how people and societies behave.
Understanding the workings of people and societies is difficult, although there are several disciplines that try.
An exclusive reliance on current data would unnecessarily hamper our efforts.
Robert Saunders Teacher - Important aspects of the functioning of a society, such as the decisions of the masses, missionary activities or military alliances, cannot be analyzed by precise experiments.
Therefore, history must serve (albeit imperfectly) as a laboratory, and data from the past must be the most vital evidence in the inevitable quest to find out how our complex species behaves and how it coexists in society.
History helps us understand change and how the society in which we live arose.
The second reason why it is important to study history is based very closely on the first.
Robert Saunders Teacher Queensland- The past is the cause of the present and the future
Anytime we are trying to find out why something has happened (whether it is a change in majorities in parliament, a major change in the teen suicide rate, or a war in the Balkans or the Middle East), we must look for the factors that gave rise to the current situation.
Sometimes the most recent story will suffice to explain a major change. However, many times it is necessary to look further back to identify the causes of a change.
Only the study of history allows us to understand how things change.
Only through history can we begin to understand the factors that bring about change; and only through history can we understand the reasons why an institution or a society persists despite change. Hence the great importance of studying history.
The importance of history in our own lives
These two fundamental reasons for studying history lay the foundation for more specific and quite diverse uses of history in our own lives.
The story well told is beautiful. Many of the most attractive historians to the general reading public are aware of the importance of dramatic and skillful writing (in addition to precision).
Robert Saunders Teacher Queensland -The biographical and military history is attractive in part because of the stories it contains. The story serves a real purpose as art and entertainment based on aesthetic foundations, but also human understanding.
Well-told stories reveal how people and societies have really worked, and raise insights about the human experience in other times and places.
The same aesthetic and humanistic goals inspire people to make the effort to reconstruct rather remote pasts, removed from immediate utility in the present.
By Robert Saunders Teacher - Robert lee Saunders teacher qld
Robert Saunders Teacher - Important aspects of the functioning of a society, such as the decisions of the masses, missionary activities or military alliances, cannot be analyzed by precise experiments. Therefore, history must serve (albeit imperfectly) as a laboratory, and data from the past must be the most vital evidence in the inevitable quest to find out how our complex species behaves and how it coexists in society.
