The reason I am interested in history is because it has to do with figuring out WHY the world has come to be the way it is. It is like having a great mystery or a great puzzle that one is trying to solve.
I am also interested in thinking about how people in the past experienced their lives. Not necessarily in what conditions they faced (did they have running water, were they being bombed, etc) but in how those things made them feel.
When I teach history, students are most often interested by those lessons which ask them to think about why things happened, or how people would have responded to the way their lives were.
For example, a lesson that is always successful is one in which we discuss what slavery was like. Everyone starts with the assumption that slavery was completely horrible but they have never really thought this through. They've never really thought about the slaves as individuals with differences in personality and attitude.
In addition, they've never really thought about how much of a mystery this is. They've never thought about how we can say we KNOW how slaves felt. This is where history is a puzzle.
So history intrigues me (and I think that when my students are intrigued -- which is not always -- it is for much the same reasons) because it poses interesting intellectual challenges. It challenges us to use our logical abilities to try to figure out why things have happened the way they have. It also challenges us to use our ability to feel and to empathize with other human beings. It challenges us to use this ability to understand how people have dealt with their particular circumstances throughout history.
No comments:
Post a Comment