Importance of history

Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Okay, so this is actually a misquote with a lot of variations. It's also a very widely accepted belief.


To an extent, you can learn from the past. For example, geologists can study rocks to help determine the frequency of earthquakes. There are benefits to knowing seismic risks.

Most history is irrelevant to the modern world. The specific conditions of past events will never be replicated. We have different people, different cultures, different technology, and different everything. Discussing how things happened in a different time does not establish how things will happen today.

How is Columbus rediscovering a known continent while thinking he had crossed the world and proving critics right who insisted that he underestimated the size of the world which was already known to be round important today? Are we better for knowing the year 1492?

This makes history even less noteworthy. The schools minimize discussions of what actually happened. They instead focus on names, years, and locations.

There's another issue. What exactly has happened throughout history? I honestly don't trust textbooks. A lot of them are edited to support an agenda. Pro-America propaganda is very common in this country. I'm not going to trust some American historian who studies America for his love of the country to provide an even remotely neutral perspective.

I will provide a quick example. The North seemed tolerant of the slavery in the south for years. The Civil War didn't start until the south seceded. Ultimately, the primary cause of the war was whether or not states has the right to secede if they felt they were being oppressed. In other words, we went to war to prevent the reason our country exists in the first place.

One of my defining beliefs is: The present and future are more valuable than the past. I'm not going to say that history is completely worthless. What I will say is that there are far more important things in this world than what you will learn in history class.