Why We Should Study History 

I finally figured out why we should study history. My experience on this learning journey over the last several years has provided me with some clarity. I’m not sure of the exact moment when I figured out that digging into history can be so telling, but here I am doing the digging and loving every minute of it. 

I remember as a young person having no idea why it is important to study Canadian history in school. I was never particularly interested in knowing what happened in the past. I found it boring and wondered why anyone cared. 

What I didn’t know is that I wasn’t being taught the whole history of Canada in history class. I wasn’t being taught what really happened and I wasn’t being taught how to think critically about what I was learning. Perhaps if critical thinking had been at the forefront of our education back then I would have been able to see that there were stories, voices, and perspectives that had been almost completely erased. I would have had the wherewithal to ask my new favourite question: Who has the power in this situation?

I can point to the events of 9/11/2001 as a turning point for me. In my mid-twenties I didn’t pay much attention to the news, yet suddenly there was this historic event going on that seemed to be out of nowhere. But it wasn’t. I didn’t know the history that had brought us to this tragic point on the timeline of the relationship between the Middle East and the West. 

As my news junkie status increased and I became interested in current world issues, the more I realized how little I knew about what goes on in the world. How could I? I hadn’t studied History.

While I was completing my BEd, I took a deep dive into learning about social justice, an interest that has obviously become so important to me that I started a blog about it. Until I really started digging in and learning, I likely would have said that learning about history is important so we don’t repeat the mistakes of the past. This is just the tip of the iceberg!

We certainly don’t want to repeat the mistakes that were made in the past. However, learning about the past also helps us understand how the world has changed over time and brought us to the present. Knowing what happened in history enables us to think critically about current world issues.

Let me show you two examples that are relevant today. 

Truth and Reconciliation 

The current issues surrounding indigenous people are all about a storied past filled with atrocities that were committed at their expense. The history of these atrocities was swept under the rug by the dominant settler culture for so long that generations of people did not know what happened. 

We were all shocked when this came to light and astonished that we were so duped in school – none of our textbooks here in Canada taught us anything about residential schools or the 60s Scoop. We had no way of learning this stuff. Our parents and teachers were in the same boat because their parents and teachers had no idea either. 

So now that we know, we can’t pretend we don’t. All we can do is focus on learning the truth of what happened in our history so we can avoid making the same mistakes and so we can work on reconciling the relationship between Canadian settlers and the Indigenous peoples who inhabited Turtle Island before the rest of us showed up. 

The Israel-Palestine Conflict

Another example that is fascinating and heartbreaking for me is the current conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. The dominant culture has lots of rich and powerful friends who are supporting them, while making no reference to the history that created the conflict in the first place. This is the slant on the story that we see in our local news headlines. 

By learning a little bit of the history, I have been able to learn that there is a long history of conflict between the two groups, and the oppressed culture believes that the dominant culture is wrongly occupying their land. Words like genocide and ethnic cleansing keep coming up. Throw in a militant group who claims to be fighting for the rights of the oppressed group and you suddenly have so much division throughout the world that it’s difficult to know what you stand for in all this.    

What We Can Learn

There’s so much to learn just by looking at the parallels between these two stories, which are essentially about struggles within settler-colonial states. (In a nutshell, this means that European Imperialism has created states where the original inhabitants of the land have been oppressed by the settlers who have taken over.)  

In both scenarios, the marginalized group is oppressed by the dominant culture and the history is swept under the rug because it makes the dominant culture look bad. The dominant culture takes massive strides to eliminate the oppressed group. The oppressed culture is repeatedly villainized when they try to fight for what they believe is rightfully theirs.

This creates an information salad full of differing stories, perspectives, and voices, all of which we can learn from. It’s only worthwhile learning, though, if we consider all of the stories, all of the perspectives, and all of the voices. This is why we need to dig deep and find out the whole history.