Is History Important
13/1/19
What I describe below must be familiar to all of you, but the way I have described is what I, and many like me, perceived the situation. And how my perception has been misled.
While in school I was exposed to many different ‘subjects’, not ‘ideas’, or ‘disciplines’ or ‘areas of study’. Broadly, there were Languages, sometime at two levels, but mostly the minimal common level. Sciences, Social Studies (SS), Mathematics and Physical Training (PT). Among these there certainly was a pecking order. PT was meant for those who were somewhat deficient in academics, but certainly not for the academically ambitious ones. The languages were a necessity but not important subjects. Mathematics was important, and if you don’t have the aptitude for it, even God will not be able to come to your help when you meet the real world. Then the SS, for which no one knew the significance, whether it had to be grouped with PT or Languages, but certainly not in the Important category. We, the students felt that the subject gave employment to those who were otherwise incapable of becoming teachers; i.e., anyone who had the connections and influence to land the job of a teacher, but did not qualify for the position. This was the result of the impression created by the way things were organized and conducted in the school.
One of the reasons I had a poor opinion about SS was that it had three parts – History, Geography and Civics – each of them totally independent like islands, with nothing in common. Why there were called social studies still baffles me. Among the three, History appeared to garner greater importance, just because more class hours were devoted to it. And perhaps because of this, it attracted greater resentment from me (and my classmates). The way it was dealt with to us involved events without context, dates without relevance, and people without principles. So, my response was to cram a few dates just to get minimum marks to clear the obligatory requirements and look to move to a stage so that I could avoid or ignore it. After leaving school, over the years, my aversion to SS has slowly but steadily regressed, and i have begun to see the importance of the ‘subject’ as a body of knowledge essential for shaping the development of the mind of the citizens in their formative years.
Geography was the easiest for the breaching of the barrier, for how it could inform us about the world we share with so many others, and how you could make your life better from this knowledge. Although the ‘subject’ Civics did not inspire me from any professional or personal angle, I learnt that for a responsible citizen of a democratic society it educated the rules of the game we people build up, and the right and wrong aspects of them. For History I took a long time to see the light at the end of my dark days. It was only when I met people from other countries that I began to understand the significance of knowledge about history in one’s own culture or society.
Although I was among the first generation after the Indian independence, a milestone event dealt with in our school curricula, and lived with many who had personally experienced the event, it never made any impact on me as a young adolescent. May be it was the emotional baggage with which it was dispensed, or the valor and victimization of the personalities. I never got to connect with the people, places or institutions which came through the event, in spite of the relatively short span of about twenty years after the event. May be it was too soon, and we were trying to get out of the trauma, but I doubt it very much.
I don’t know whether it is the age that creates affinity for the study of history. The only thing that I teach are all historical events. In fact, almost all of our education (besides fiction) is about ideas and events that happened in the past, whether few hours, years or millennia. All knowledge we try to teach and build comes from our learnings and events that happened in the past. Even the deliberately forward looking concepts are derived from our experiences of the past, and to large extent influenced by our learning from history.
Delectable Debates 