Why is learning history important to the future of American culture?

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Permalink Reply by Matt Zentz on October 6, 2008 at 10:29pm

Learning history equips us with the power to not repeat mistakes.

It's like advice, though. We can become empowered by good advice and crippled by bad advice. Think about it - bell bottoms came back from the 70's and so did long straight hippie hair from the 60's. People will always have a choice. People thought bell bottoms were kinda cool and that big 80's hair was over. Have you heard of the pet rock? Thankfully, people chose not to bring that back.

What about our current mess? The housing bubble. Take a few minutes to read about Japan's bubble. Seems a little familiar.

One problem we have now is that people don't read like they used to. How many of your friends can you say read a book or more each month? I would have a hard time counting. And it's not like my friends are dummies. There are so many people competing for our attention that we are robbed of time and typically result to skimming RSS headlines or catching "important" news on The Soup.

Don't get me wrong, The Soup is funny and RSS is awesome because we can pick and choose topics that interest us. But often times the meat of the matter lies well after the headline. Imagine reading only the chapter titles of the Grapes of Wrath. I don't actually know if the chapters have titles, but you would never gain the true understanding of the Joad's challenges. You would simply read from the titles that challenges existed and then would have no idea why or what they did to conquer them.

Now throw in a generation of parents who don't read themselves, then raise kids who learn by their parents example and never become avid readers. Imagine what our country's leaders we'll be like in 30-40 years!

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Permalink Reply by Michael J Dukehart, II on October 7, 2008 at 9:05am

Sorry to burst your bubble on the pet rock http://www.littlerox.com/store.cfm

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Permalink Reply by Matt Zentz on October 7, 2008 at 8:17pm

Awesome!

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Permalink Reply by Mike Seidle on October 7, 2008 at 8:21am

History is our collected experience and collected wisdom. It is both knowledge and insight. History is the only place where you can connect decisions and action to outcomes. For Americans, our history is forged from a grand experiment in self-government and self-reliance and the result is we see life as less destiny and more forged from willpower, hard work and ingenuity.

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Permalink Reply by Erik Deckers on October 7, 2008 at 8:50am

I don't think we have as strong a grasp on history as, say, Europe or the Middle East does. We can barely remember as far back as 17 years ago, when we had another financial bailout, or 21 years ago when we had another stock market crash. The only people who remember it are the ones who were there. Young journalists don't bring it up unless one of the old, grizzled financial editors says, "This reminds me of the crash in 1987."

Needless to say, we don't incorporate the lessons we learned there, and we definitely repeat the same mistakes.

If we could just remember our history, Hollywood wouldn't repeat the same movies over and over again, such as re-making "The Longest Yard" 30+ years after the original was made -- recently enough that the original star was still able to appear in the remake. Ditto for King Kong.

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Permalink Reply by Michael J Dukehart, II on October 7, 2008 at 9:03am

If America was not into history then why does tv land have such high viewership.

Our collective lack of interest in American history and global history is based on two problems:

1) the lack of interest in reading something tht might require thinking and reading at the same time. I am not one that stays away from the mind mush reading, but every so often you have to sit down with a large volume and hack your way through it. I love Edward R Murrow. Ready a very detailed biography on him.....even though I was engrossed in the book it took me over a year to ready the book because I would read soemthing I did not know and have to research it further to get a better understanding of the context.

2) lack of interest in what others, specifically older others, have to tell us. Ask an elderly person about their past or what they have learned and they will tell you. May people/publications state that thoses who faught in WWII were the great generation. most of the guys I have sat down with will say they don't know about that, most have said that they were young kids out trying to stay alive, trying to engoy the experience while being scared out of their minds. that ddoes not ans should not deminish what they have done.

I am luck enough to be in possession of many family history pieces, so hopefully my girls will grow up to understand where we came from and what we had to go through to get to where they are today.

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Permalink Reply by Steve Stuck on October 7, 2008 at 9:27am

I don't feel other cultures or countries outweigh each other in a better grasp of history. Each country historically has had their own failures and tend to rehash failed political ideas that try to set up culture.

Culture is what a nations people set up, not government intervention or regulation. Classic example is our nations idea in politics of raising up one group in the hope of "fairness or affirmative action". Affirmative action is not just one race of people, but is also the poor or minority group of people who are said to be having hard times. These same policies we introduce now, have been done in other countries with results that should teach us a lesson.

While many say we can learn from history, that is is usually not the case. People tend to think only in Stage 1 thinking and never look at a policy in other terms (unintended consequences). I guess the perfect example is the subprime market. Common complaint in countries around the world is that some groups have less "access" to credit, making it harder for them to start businesses or to buy homes, for example. Yet both government programs and private lending organizations have suffered devastating losses when lending to groups who are said to have denied "access" to credit in a market economy. Malaysia is an example of a culture that suffered from this before the US. They gave access to groups/people with poor credit in the tune of 55,000 loans. Only 6,000 were ever paid back.

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Permalink Reply by Nancy Conner on October 7, 2008 at 10:47am

If you don’t understand the past, you don’t understand the present. In the words of a paraphrase of William Faulkner, “The past is not dead. In fact, it’s not even past.”

In my view, history doesn’t so much teach us what to do or what to avoid in the future as it explains how we got to where we are in the present. That’s why it’s always interesting to listen to a historian’s take on a subject s/he has studied.

To address the question, though, I do think we Americans are less likely to feel attached to our past since we have less of it. Europeans and Asians have pasts that go back millennia, Africans and Native Americans even farther. Our society seems to go back to 1776 or 1607 or at the most 1492, and even then we were trying to start something new for the express purpose of leaving the past behind. That may even be the most striking aspect of our collective history.

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Permalink Reply by Wanda Stine on October 8, 2008 at 12:39am

We need to teach our kids to fall in love with our country's history from a very early age. Patriotism has now become a thing of the past (in many ways its easy to understand why). But this makes our culture weaker in unity as Americans. Almost as if there is no longer any common ground for folks to agree on. There are so many reasons for this, too many to count. But I feel that early education is much to blame. It starts when our children are young. It started when WE were young. I can remember HATING history in school. Nothing interested me---all dates and battles and names to remember. I wanted to know about the lives of people. Instead of memorizing I wanted to learn. And there is a difference. There are many ways we can bring a passion for history into our classrooms. And I believe that if we make that effort, patriotism will spark again and the value of our country's history will be on the rise....and possibly inspire a more common ground among Americans.

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Permalink Reply by Elizabeth Stahl on October 8, 2008 at 5:18pm

Pat
So happy you brought this up. I had a minor in US History in college and I find this issue interesting. So much of our future has been reflected in our past. Even though we have been involved in several global conflicts from WW1 - through present day - the overall Amercian culture is Isolationist - we only want to be involved globally if our immediate self interest is at risk. This has been a classic reaction going back to Hitler in WW2 - we didn't make strong efforts to get involved until we were personally attacked. Our present economy is reflective of the credit spending era of the 1920's prior to the colapse of the economy. We have always prided ourselves as the world heros - America to the rescue once we get involved. I don't know that we can say that right now and that hurts. We have moved from being a society of self reliant individuals to a society dependent on the government for solutions. I think underneath it all - we still believe we can buckle down and get through this but on the surface we don't appear to want to give up anything to regain our self respect. We can't band together and be a hero when we are headed toward a second civil war on the issue of self reliance vs government reliance. The same issue faced during the Civil War - the individuals right to freedom vs the individual being subserviant to a another authority ( in this case the government)

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