what is the point of studing history?

Question

what do you think please tell me

Answer 1

For you, there is no reason to study history. It appears that you will be condemned to live a life where your most frequent question would be "Do you want fries with that?"

Answer 2

Studying history allows us to recognize others' mistakes when we make them again.

History is more than events. History is also people and everything about them. If people were different, the events would also have been something else. We study history for its examples, both good and bad. This worked - why? This didn't work - why again?

Why and how do despots rise? What does it take to stop them? Why don't good men stop them when they could easily do it? Hint: it is because they ARE good men. Why do people come up with something like the Holocaust? How do we keep it from happening again?

The answers are all there waiting for us, if we are willing to study that nasty word, History.

Answer 3

The reason we study history is because WE ARE the past: we are the sum of all the events--good, bad, and indifferent--that have happened to us. This sum product guides our actions in the present.

This is true not only for the individual (imagine what would have happened to you had your parents never met, or had your parents raised you with different values), but for large societies as well (how would the U.S. be different, for example, if it had lost the American Revolution, or if the Spanish had founded the colonies of North America that became the United States?). In both cases the United States as we know it would not exist.

The only way we can understand who we are and how we got to be that way is by studying the past. Similarly, the only way we can understand others is by studying their past. If we don't understand what made them who they are--in terms of how they think and act--we will make all sorts of mistakes in our interactions with them. Think of how you treat people differently based on how you know them. The same is true for countries when it comes to diplomacy. Our failures in Iraq were borne of a limited understanding of who they are (because we haven't taken the time to truly study and understand their past).

"We study the past to understand the present; we understand the present to guide the future." -- William Lund

Hope these ideas help!

Answer 4

The point of studying History is simple. Everything that has happened before has gone into making our world what it is today and what we are today as people. Without knowledge of what has come before, how could we function well in the present, and plan for a brighter future?

Good luck and may God bless you.

Answer 5

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it !” - George Santayana -The Life of Reason 1905.
The main reasons to learn from history are : If you care how the world you live in came about, If you care where you and your family came from, If you might like to avoid repeating the mistakes that people have made in the past. History gives
us an idea who we are.

Answer 6

The past is important. You need to know how the world you live in developed. This is something you need to be interested in. I'm sure it's boring sometimes but we have to learn from our mistakes and the only way to do that is by examining history. **cough**cough**George Bush**cough**

Answer 7

Those who never study History and never learn about it are doomed to continually read someone else's guesses about it, and remain largely ignorant about it - like here on Yahoo Answers.

Answer 8

It keeps people who haven't anything else to contribute to society employed as teachers. Otherwise we'd have to tolerate them as they filled cups with coffee and pontificated from behind donut dispensing counters about how clever they are. This way they are isolated from the general population and we're all spared the crapola. Well most of us, people in schools have to listen to it. It's always fascinated me that the greatest argument put forth for the study of history is the importance of not repeating the past. From my observations all we do is repeat the past, albeit in different costumes and with greater conveniences. We're creatures of perennial habit according to the study of the past. We do what we do over and over again and the study of history justifies the bad behavior, excuses it as our nature. We lost our way as a species once we began to record our history some ten thousand years ago, choosing that point in time as the beginning of our ascent and picking out elements of past deeds to define us in the collective. Study the moment we're in, that has merit and meaning. The past is dead and gives nothing but excuses to repeat the same endless mistakes that began with cultivation, permanent settlement, and the greatest sin on the earth, ownership. My opinion only, this is what I think.

Answer 9

Those who don't study history are doomed to repeat it.