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| Yes | 80% | 542 votes | Total: 677 votes | |
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History is most certainly our teacher for without history how then are we to learn from our mistakes of the past? Alongside history goes hindsight, the two are connected and cannot be separated. How many times have we heard someone say, if they could do such a thing over again then they would have done it in a different way? When we sit back and really take a look at our past can we really say we learned anything? We most certainly can, and because we have learned, we thank the past for that. With history comes experience and with experience comes hindsight.
What would happen if we did not have history?
If we did not have history, if our lives, or the life of this world was not recorded and seared into our memories, then we, I believe, would continue to make the same mistakes over and over. You could well say that mankind, - even with our blood-ridden past - has learned nothing from the past, so what is the point of history? With all the bloodshed and death around us then truly, what have we learned? We have learned that violence begets violence. An eye for an eye until the whole world becomes blind in a mayhem of orgy and destruction.
Throughout time if there is one thing that history has taught us it is this: That we must continue to look back to the past in order to work and strive for a better future for ourselves, our children and the creatures and other life forms that share this world with us. Without history as our teacher - which it most certainly is - then we would continue to fall by the wayside. History is our guide. It does not tell us what to do but rather it shows us graphic examples of what did go wrong when we chose the wrong path.
To have those facts in our hands and to read and see them for ourselves - and yet, to stay blind to the facts - makes us the bigger fools. Pity the fool who refuses to see the events of the past. Pity the fool who moves on ever forward with the attitude that what happened yesterday could not happen today? For the ripples of history always come back to haunt us in the present day.
History is our teacher in so many ways guiding us into choosing the right path, the right way, in our personal lives - and also the life of the world as a whole. History, whether we like it or not, is a stark recorder {teacher} of events that happened yesterday, or so many years before. Gently guiding us onto the right pathway, subtly urging us not to make the same mistakes we made in the past, Yet always allowing us to have free will to be able to pick the way we choose.
But if we do then we must reap what we sow, reap the consequences of our actions. History does repeat itself, but only if we allow the mistakes we made in the past to rise up and happen again. That could be not just in our own personal lives but for politicians and world leaders too, who send countless thousands to war on their behalf {as has happened so many times before in the past.}. They could do no better than to look back at history and to really learn from the errors of their ways.
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Learn more about this author, Wayne Leon Learmond.
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No
There is a little saying, "Until lions have their own historians, tales of hunting will always glorify the hunter." And that is the basic nature of history: it is subject to individual interpretation, manipulation and wishful thinking, especially in the past where the evidence was not as carefully preserved, well documented and accessible as it is now. So history is obviously a poor teacher, otherwise it would be more representative of our humanity, not just those with the power, and we would have learnt much more from it.
History cannot be our teacher because we would not be repeating the errors of yesterday, repeating almost the same results without learning any new lessons. Iraq and Vietnam are a case in point. Despite the awful loss of life in Vietnam, the frustration with winning that war and it's sheer viciousness, the capitulation at the end and the general dissatisfaction about US involvement, President Bush is happily revisiting the sins of his father to do even worse in Iraq. Throwing caution to the wind, he has squandered American reputation and billions on something he could never hope to win, proving beyond doubt that history had nothing to teach him.
History is also dominated by particular slants, pervasive manipulation as excuse for bad memory and it mainly favours those who can give a good narrative and those well known, not the unsung and silent heroes who actually helped to make the substance of that history. We only hear of the great works of great people while every brutal act is downplayed and desensitised to favour the victor, like the British Empire, an oppressive, racist, colonial regime which forced British customs, administration and language on many races across the world under the guise of 'discovering' new lands and peoples and 'civilising' them, while robbing them of their resources and extending British power. Yet that has been reported in history as something glorious, a time which put the 'Great' in Britain without acknowledging, until recently, the insensitivity, sheer brutality and racist nature of some its administrations, not to mention the legacy of displacement and loss o local pride that was left.
History could teach us a lot, but it is not the nature of man to learn, otherwise it would curb our innovative spirit through fear of repeating the consequences shown in history. Our nature is to keep creating new history with the hope of changing what has already happened, and definitely bettering it. Not to really learn from it. Hence President Bush's rash actions. So we are the teachers of history through the mark and legacy we strive to leave behind us, while history leaves a never ending trail of people who failed to learn from its recurring and ever potent lessons.
Learn more about this author, Elaine Sihera.
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