During the school day, I always hear somebody say "how does this information apply to me?", "when would I ever need/use this in my life?", "why do we have to learn this?", and more qustions of these types in every single period. I sometimes (most of the times, actually) agree that I will never need to know the information that is given to me, but I do think that knowing/learning history can help.
I think that learning history is not memorizing dates and names but understanding the people who made such decisions. In AP Euro, I did not understand why Dr. B was teaching us humanism and other abstract ideas since I did not consider those abstract topics as history. To me, history was composed of names, dates, and wars. However, I now understand why he wanted us to know the reason things happened the way they do. After understanding the reason one would act in a certain way, I finally knew the difference between understanding history and memorizing random facts of history.
I feel that one is capable of applying the subject "history" to his everyday life only if he understands the people of the history. I certainly do not think that I would use all the detailed facts of history in my life, but as long as I have the general understanding of the reason why people act in ways that they do, I would have a better understanding of the human nature.
-Joanne
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Do you ever feel as if we learned things too detailed last year? Sometimes I found myself lost and struggling in the middle of some event and had to step back and grasp the bigger picture. My troubles relate to the whole latitude vs. longitude discussion from today. Sometimes I went too detailed into one particular subject.
ReplyDelete-- tori
The point of learning history is the same as the point of learning all the other subjects: to learn how to interpret and understand different things. We benefit less from memorizing every one of Hamilton's views than learning his general ideas and then applying those concepts.
ReplyDelete-Audrey