Why learning from history is cool : Part 1

You might wonder, what history has to do with life improvement or personal development area? Answer is a lot. If we do not learn from our past, we will bound to make same or similar mistakes again and again. If we do not know where we came from, how will we know where to go forward. Learning from our world and society history as well our OWN past, we can learn lot of things that hopefully will enhance our present and future life.

I will be the first to admit it, when I was in school, I disliked history so much. I thought history was such boring subject, mostly due to the fact that we students were forced to memorize dates of each wars, kings and other nations. I could not understand why it was important to memorize the dates then or now. I preferred science, math subjects instead as it has definitive answers and solutions unlike abstractness of history and other like subjects.

However, now as I am older and not forced to remember silly dates, I find that learning from history or our past has become a favorite with me. If you were like me in past, you may wonder what is so cool about learning from our past? As most of us like to live in present time and worry about our future such as retirement, kids, paying off debts, no wonder many of us do not have time or interest in look back in to our own past, let alone world’s history.

I will share with you a few reasons that I think learning from history is cool and why you should give it a try at least once. While history may be not be as exciting as murder mystery, science fiction or powerful technology, it is actually everything rolled in to one. Lot of things in past we thought were truth, we are debunking those as a myth and making a new history and will keep changing until hopefully we will get it right. For example, in past we believed that earth was flat and not round. Here is an interesting article that explores Who invented the idea of flat earth? In modern times like now, there are still a few educated people and scientists still believe that to be true, see here Flat earth society and they show reasons to believe why it flat earth is the truth. I am not here to take sides, but share that history shows many sides to a story and that why it makes an interesting to learn from various theories from our past.

Our history may teaches us contradictory views, or it might show different story based on where you live. For example, in India students are taught that Columbus actually was looking for India for its spices but could not find the place during those early no navigation time and instead he found America and native people who lived here were called red Indians or native Indians for that reasons. Now in US, our history did not mentioned India at all with Columbus’s journey.

This creates a confusion on young minds and adult minds as well. Often time history is written by winners and we may get only one point of view. That is why when we want to learn any history or any subject, try to learn from at least 3-5 different point of view to get best overall knowledge and make up your own judgment on the subject. We will not know the complete truth as we were not present but we still can learn lot from the past to improve our present and future life, not only in global sense but also as personal sense too.

Here are some of the subject we can learn from our earth history:

• Evolution of life
• First lives and creation of animal, birds, fishes and human
• Early religions and progress of current religious and spiritual practices
• Geography and Map building
• Early food growing to current state
• Learning to crops, rain water, clothes, shelter
• Medical science from its infancy
• Protection weapons to current milatary gadgets
• Empires building and collapse
• Natural disasters and ways to survive those better
• Diseases and medicines
• Learning from birds, animals and other life
• From early star gazing to current space projects
• From cave living to current multi-story building with heater and Air conditioning
• Why some culture and language survived and other did not
• Dinosaurs and other extint animals and preventing future extinction
• Learning religious and color tolerance from past days
• Learning for transportation with trials and errors, – Cars, Planes, Trains, Bicycle, Scooter and more
• Electricity and other modern scientific conveniences such as cooking stoves, fridge and so on
• Computer, Internet, phone, video phone, and more
• Creation of languages, spoken and written to communicate

Lot of things we take it for granted, was invented or thought about after much trials and errors from our past ancestors. Without someone inventing an internet, I and you will not be able to blog and share our thoughts.

So, let’s give history another chance and learn from it. In next part, we will take a look at more on why to study history and what type of history lessons to learn and which ones to avoid.

While learning from history lesson may not seem like subject towards life improvement or personal development, I like to think they are closely related.  As if we want to improve our self and our lives, we also need to look in our own past and learn from it. What do you think?

Please click here to check out Why learning from history is cool : Part 2 here.

Click here now to read fun and last part of the history lessons series here Why learning from history is cool: Part 3 .
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