“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
— George Santayana
As NDB students, we all have experienced taking the core classes of English, Science, Math and…History (or Social Studies).
We know what it’s like to stress about how long the French and American Revolutions lasted, the political revolutions of the Enlightenment or the dates and mechanisms that led to the two world wars.
I am willing to bet that we have all thought at some point: Why do we even need to learn history? Why must we worry and memorize seemingly unimportant dates?
The present is the present, and the past is better when it is far behind us, right? Not at all.
What is history anyway? It is the study, interpretation and construction of past events. Let’s think about that. The studies are the dates that give us a lot of stress on testing day. The key part here, however, is the interpretation and construction. If you had a confrontation with someone and approached them in an aggressive manner, you probably would heed the lesson to not approach in the same manner to prevent future conflict.
Therefore, history is not the consumption of endless facts; it is understanding why a certain event came to happen and if it should be repeatable in the future, or if it can be fixed by higher ethical and moral standards.
History teacher Jonathan Tomczak shares that this critical analysis of history gives us the ability to “look[ing] at sources for any given information and understand[ing] what their potential biases are, but also understanding that those biases don’t mean sources are useless, it just means it’s relevant in a specific, limited way.”
Sometimes, history does not always have a perfect silver lining. Isn’t it nice to learn how America got its freedom from the British colonizers? How we became a nation institutionalized upon the morals and ethicality of democratic practices? How we are a republic where “the people’s” voice is heard with change-making fervor? How this nation became a “hero” in WWII by helping Europe defeat a tyrannical Nazi Germany?
Yeah, it is incredible. I get emotional talking about American history and the American dream.
But there is always ugly history.
From the American history perspective, there is the Native American genocide and how American settlers chose to kill the Indigenous peoples’ food source to subdue them to their will. There is the aftermath of WWII: how German Nazis were given citizenship and high-tier American government positions while Jews escaping the horrors of the antisemitic war were denied the chance to start a new life. There were the Jim Crow laws, the Middle Passage exploitation, slavery, racial lynching, segregation and Latin American and Middle Eastern interventions, the eugenics movement and more.
Am I saying that we should never feel pride for our country and who we are as a people? No. Am I saying that we should always live in the past? No.
History teacher Graeson Fee says, “whether [the history] is good or bad or nice or ugly, the entire story needs to be told. And what can make history complex for people is that what might look good from one point of view about what happened might look ugly from another…I think it’s just important that we are honest with ourselves about our history, and that means considering all points of view.”
I chose George Santayana’s quote on not remembering the past because I believe that if any community or government is making an effort to forget the past, to erase it, they have the intention of repeating it again. Regardless of whether anyone has this clear intention, as Elizabeth Brodeur shares, “if you don’t understand the past and know what happened, you’re not aware of its possibility to happen”.
In a world racing into the future with important technical innovations, it is hard to remember to heed the past or even care about studying it. But I encourage you, NDB, to walk into your history classes with pride. You are not only investing in your future but in the future of national and global security as an educated new generation rises from the ashes of misconceptions and deceit.
