Last Friday, my kids had the day off school due to a teacher in-service day, and — how he ended up with this I don’t know — my middle son spent quite some time watching a youtube video of the Battle of Thermopylae from the History Channel, and spent the greater part of our walk to Noodles & Co., and the dinner itself, and the walk home, retelling the story to my husband. He announced that he wanted to be a historian — one of those guys that appeared in the History Channel documentaries (yes, now more readily found on youtube than on the TV) — and when we discussed the job market, conceded that he could consider something more pedestrian such as being a high school history teacher.
And a couple days ago, collegeinsurrection.com linked to the Wall Street Journal, which summarized the results of the What Will They Learn study on the strength or weakness of core education requirements at universities, giving universities an “A” if they require at least six of the seven core subjects of composition, literature, foreign language (3 semesters), US government or history (survey course), economics, math, and science, vs. an F if one or none of these subjects is required.
(My Alma Mater Michigan State earned a C, for requiring math, science, and composition; the flagship University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign earned an F, with its only requirement of the 7 being foreign language; Notre Dame earned a B for requiring math, science, composition, and foreign language. Looking at their ratings more generally, it seems to be exceedingly rare for a US history class to be required, though, to be sure, in principle, the rating is based on the narrow requirement of US history so conceivably a class in European or World history could be required at some of these schools and still fail to satisfy the criteria.)
Anyway, this all led me to think about the bigger-picture question of “why study history?” remembering my days of thinking about how to communicate exactly this, as I adjunct-taught for a semester before leaving the Academy for a job that would actually pay real money.
Of course, there’s the dictum about not knowing and repeating history, but it’s not really that. Most of the time, when we think we understand the “lessons” of history, we’re wrong, because whatever situation we think we’re comparing the present to, isn’t really comparable.
It’s clear that a decent understanding of the recent past is fairly important for understanding the world today. How does the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, the Civil Rights Movement, and the War on Poverty impact African-Americans today? How did World War II and the Cold War create our modern world? How did China come out of seemingly nowhere to have such a dominant spot in manufacturing? Why is the Middle East such a gigantic mess? etc. But how far back can you take this “understand how the world got where it is today” approach to the “why” of history? Certainly it doesn’t give you a reason for studying the ancient Greeks, except to the extent that you just want to for fun.
But here are two other reasons:
First of all, studying history, even of the fairly distant past, teaches that decisions have consequences, sometimes quite unintended consequences that couldn’t have been at all foreseen at the time. The Persian War, the cause of all the trouble at Themopylae, was, as described in this documentary, the consequence of Darius, and then his son Xerxes seeking revenge for the Athenians having aided rebellious Greek cities at the edge of the Persian Empire. Oops. It’s reasonably well-known that the Romans invited various Germanic tribes to serve as mercenary soldiers, who then got it in their head that they should make themselves at home. Sometimes, the “unintended consequences” were truly unknowable and extraordinarily far-reaching, such as the deadly spread of Old World diseases in the New World, or (this came from a History Channel documentary back in the days when the History Channel featured history) the tale that when the Vikings travelled to the coast of North America, they met with seemingly-friendly natives, offered them their food and drink, and the next day those natives weren’t so friendly any longer — because, the speculation goes, the drink was milk or milk-based, the indigenous Americans had no dairying culture, and were lactose intolerant, and all got sick and thought the Vikings were poisoning them. Had this not happened, the speculation goes, the First Contact between the hemispheres could have been peaceful and permanent, and would have made for a radically different course of events.
The point is that studying history means learning about Cause and Effect with illustrations from some concrete time period or another.
And here’s the second reason: history = multiculturalism. Oh, I don’t mean that you can study the history of the Oppressed Group of your choice. I mean that, if multiculturalism is about learning that there are other cultures out there in the world which are different than your own (rather than learning about this history of “underrepresented minorities” in the United States), then pretty much every era of history except our own recent past qualifies.
I mean, it’s the Spartans! — exposing your child if the elders deemed him unfit. A harsh life of military training beginning in childhood, in order to, first, obtain slaves to farm the fields, and, second, keep those slaves from rebelling, and, incidentally, to gain honor as the 300 did. A young man, being presented with his shield, is told, “with it or on it” — that is, come home from battle with your shield intact, successful in battle, or be carried home, dead. How much more foreign can you get?
Or perhaps the middle ages, with your future largely dictated by your birth — as the child of a knight or a peasant — or perhaps with the exciting possibilities of the emerging cities, or perhaps cut short by plague or raiders or war, but with so many unknowns about the world that they sought out supernatural explanations.
So three cheers for history!
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