History is Important

History. The word evokes different feelings and sentiments for everyone. For one person, it may be the most interesting subject and for someone else, it may be the worst, most hated subject. I totally understand that. But I’m here to tell you why history, and knowing history, is important.
Several researches and studies show us that the number of students that study history at university is reducing every day. When we consider the number of students that choose history as their college major, there has been a 9% reduction. At school too, for the majority of students, history is annoying and boring. Is this, however, true? Is history boring, or is the way/method of teaching history boring?
Often, mostly in school, we observe that there aren’t many teachers/professors that teach history in a fun and interesting way. They only read the textbooks, without really explaining anything. They are not passionate about the subject that they teach (exceptions exist, of course. BMM students at Ruia know who I’m talking about). If there is no passion on the teacher’s part, of course learning is not interesting! One must organise engaging activities (especially for children) so that they remain interested, inquisitive and captivated. There is no point in putting children in a situation where learning something new feels like a chore.
In addition to this, students think that is only about memorising dates, and nothing more than that. However, that isn’t completely true. Yes, one must remember dates, but they are there only to give context, imagine the era and to better understand the society and traditions of that particular period.
Also, several people think that history isn’t practical or useful today, the events have already taken place, the people involved are dead. That’s all. We can’t do anything about it, so why should we learn about it?
However, I insist that history is very important in our lives! By learning history, we think about our own lives in a different way. About how our present world had been created, and because of which events. We hear stories of adventure, of war, of kings, of great personalities who changed the world, and also of cruel people. We try not to repeat the mistakes that our ancestors made.
History helps us to improve our future. We can make the dreams of phenomenal men and women a reality, the dreams of those who didn’t have the means or the technology to do so. We can invent new things, develop strong opinions, thoughts and essential values. Archaeologists have decoded ancient manuscripts, so we can learn more about ancient civilisations and the differences between various cultures. We can learn how our languages evolved, how we started communicating with each other and why. We can try to wrap our heads around the sheer amount of hard work, struggles and courage that was necessary to bring us where we are today. In some cases, we can even realise how lucky we are to live in a more inclusive, diverse, world (a lot of progress still needs to be made, but I think we are getting there slowly and steadily). This teaches us to be fascinated by the amazing world that we live in. We must aspire to be inspired by history, instead of blocking or ignoring it completely, or denying that certain events did or did not take place.
My point is, we must all be conscious of the importance of history in our lives and that we must grab every opportunity that we get to learn about the history of our world.

“If you don’t know where you come from, how will you know where you’re going?” – Shashi Tharoor