HISTORY CLASS POST

Why we must learn history.

History helps us learn from past societies. History helps us to make the best judgements about building our communities and nations. History serves as a laboratory of evidence. It helps us to avoid mistakes by providing us with evidence of past failures, past cultural interactions, and past successes. Failure is not a bad thing.  Edison failed one thousand times before getting the light bulb right.  Augustine was a drunk and a womanizer, before he found God and became a great theologian.  Failure can be a great teaching tool with great successes that inspire us. They inspire us to make a difference in our world. It only takes one person to make a difference and taking a look at history reminds us of those people such as, Gandhi, Mother Theresa, and Martin Luther King, Jr.

The study of history helps us develope critical thinking skills. The questions of "How did that come about?" or "What led to such destruction?"  or "When was that invented?" or "Where did that term or that phrase come from?" or "Who might have contributed to the building of a social class?" and so on. Critical thinking also helps us develope writing effectiveness. In writing effectively we can convey the message or point we are trying to make so that the reader can understand what we want them to understand.  This is turn teaches us to speak more effectively as well.

Speaking and writing are our two main forms  of communication today.   We cannot effectively communicate history without good writing skills and thinking skills and we cannot effectively communicate with each other and our world without these skills.  History helps us think critically about other cultures, other peoples, and other professional groups.  History helps us to interact well with others of different faiths and other moral standards. So the study of history developes our thinking abilities so that we can better respond to daily living in a vastly diverse culture. You must have history to be well educated, to be able to adapt to changes in our culture, to learn from past mistakes and successes, and to be inspired to make changes to our world today.