History is one of ancient sciences humanity, the subject of which is the study of the facts and events of the past, their causal relationship. The cradle of the origin of history is considered Ancient Greece. Her father - the founder is the famous ancient Greek historian and philosopher Herodotus (V century BC).
Why study history?
What gives us the study of history? A question that probably every person asked himself. The answer to it is simple and obvious - by studying the past, we are building our future, guided by the rich experience of the generation that lived many centuries before us. No wonder the most zealous connoisseurs of history, the ancient Greeks, called her "teacher of life." The study of history reveals to us the colorful world of past reality. We become direct participants in the events that have sunk into oblivion, which have affected the formation of modern human society. History has no unimportant pages, because every century, lived by mankind, carries an instructive and mentoring character.
The main difficulty in studying history is that all historical facts based on the writings of participants and observers of events, and in most cases they are filled with political subjectivism and share all the delusions of their time. Therefore, the main thing in the study of history is that it is not enough just to state historical events, but also to track their influence on subsequent time.
What is history?
History should be treated not only as a scientific discipline, but also as a fascinating way to learn about the past. Here everyone will find something interesting for themselves, because history is not only a chronicle of bloody warriors and revolutions, but also bright medieval knightly tournaments, exquisite balls of the Victorian era, traditions of the Slavic peoples that are important and dear to every Russian heart.
History painstakingly works with eternal human values, but never makes judgments on its own. She grants us this right. It acts as an impartial observer of the life of mankind, never points to the perpetrators and victims. We must do this through a deep analysis of historical facts.
Knowledge of the past history
The process of knowing the past is obligatory for every person, because history has repeatedly struck humanity with its cyclical nature. Some historical events tend to be repeated to this day, but in a more modified form. History shows the impossibility of changing the past so that a person thinks about how he builds the present, because in a few years this will already replenish her lists.
History should be taught in order to have the right to be called a truly educated person. After all, to know and remember how the statehood of their country was born, what path the people went through in order to become a full-fledged society, how the culture of mankind developed is the sacred duty of a person and a citizen.
Once starting to study history, a person cannot stop this long and such an interesting process, and often it lasts a lifetime. After all, you can study history not only in archives and when working with artifacts. It surrounds us in our cities and villages, it lives in our grandparents, in our present. You just need to have a desire to join its mysterious and fascinating content.
Today we'll talk about what is history for. Many do not fully understand why study history? Let's figure it out!
For each person, history is a list of events that once happened in the past. For some people, the events of the past do not inspire anything important, and some do not even believe in the existence of past events.
The very first book that described the history of past years was called very simply - "History". It was written by Herodotus. The study of history was in itself very attractive, since a person created many macrotheories about the origin of one or another part of nature. There are 3 parts in the macro theory: the theory of socio-economic formations, the theory of local civilizations, the theory of post-industrial society.
It is no secret to many that our modern life relies on past experience. As an example, we can take politicians who, first of all, rely on the experience of their ancestors and try not to make their mistakes in modern times. Majority creative people use ancient works of art to create new unique ideas.
History can give many examples in which individuals or nations made irreparable mistakes. It is from history that the main tactics of warfare are taken, which were created by great generals, whose names absolutely every person knows. The great commanders were Alexander Nevsky, Dmitry Donskoy, Suvorov, Kutuzov, Peter I and many other great people.
Various inventions that would never have been realized if not for history. For example, most modern medicines have very, very ancient origins, the main difference is only the method of obtaining and manufacturing the medicine.
A special attitude should be to the history of Russia, which is unique. On the path of development, our country has suffered many victories and failures, from which our history has gradually evolved. Studying the history of ancestors, it is important to understand the role of our country on a global scale.
It must be said that the history of one textbook cannot be an accurate reflection of the events that actually took place. This is a kind of selective view of a particular author. A lot of facts are hidden, a lot is distorted, so one more very important point in the study of history is its analysis and comprehension. One of the reasons, why study history- this is an opportunity to form your own picture of the world, to understand the main patterns in society, studying and analyzing data from different authors with different points vision.
As a result, through a thorough analysis of the various historical events people try to avoid those mistakes again in the future. That is the essence of history.
Be sure to write your opinions and arguments about why the story is needed in the comments. We will be happy to develop this topic into a discussion.
Note: an option to improve grades in coursework, diplomas to order. But what is real knowledge?
Why know history?
“He who does not know the past is left without a future”
History is one of the few words behind which there are entire epochs. It contains millions of destinies, its subject of study is always Man and Time. Perhaps there is practically no such person who has never heard of Alexander the Great, Christopher Columbus and Napoleon Bonaparte. These people left a deep mark on the memory of the world and changed the course of history. They became a thin thread between the past and the future.
To understand the value of history for modern man, you need to go back to its origins. One of the first historical books is the nine-volume History of Herodotus (5th century BC), for us this is an example of the life of people from the time of Antiquity, even Cicero of ancient Rome political figure, the orator and philosopher said about this book that it is: "... a witness of the past, the light of truth, a living memory, a teacher of life, a messenger of antiquity."
Ukrainian historian Mikhail Alexandrovich Maksimovich (1804-1873), was one of the first to study the history of ancient Kyiv, he devoted more than 25 articles to this topic. In them, he first showed the role of Petro Mohyla in the creation and development of Ukrainian culture. Mikhail Sergeevich Grushevsky (1866 -1934), he owns more than two thousand works on the history, sociology, literature, ethnography and folklore of Ukraine. He went down in history as a great chronicler and author of the History of Ukraine. And many other outstanding people who collected and preserved for us information about the past of our country.
All historical books, on which more than one year of work was spent, were left by the people of the past for their followers, for future generations, so that they, relying on the experience of the past, would prevent mistakes in the future. The modern historian Agnes McKenzie writes in Celtic Scotland: “History is more than the study of the past. This is the study of the origins of the present and the roots of the future.
History preserves the integrity of the people. It is impossible to imagine a country on the entire globe that would not keep its past in memory. It is impossible to live in our native land and not know who lived here before us, not to know and not to remember their labors, glory, delusions and mistakes. Knowledge of history is gratitude to the departed generations, for the legacy that we inherited from them. History is a human life that has already ended, no one will ever return it or remake it, but it continues in us. Every word and action we make creates a story. We involuntarily create it, through the preservation of the old and the creation of the new.
Knowledge of the history of one's state, one's people and world history forms a national dignity in a person, helps to see the origins of national culture, to understand and realize one's role in it. Knowing history helps not to repeat it. This is the evolution of human consciousness, its nutrition and enlightenment.
To the talk that history has not taught anyone and nothing, the outstanding historian V. O. Klyuchevsky replied: "History teaches even those who do not learn from it: it teaches them a lesson for ignorance and neglect."
The text is large so it is divided into pages.
Why should we study history?
The history teacher has to answer this question practically every day for both students and parents and even other teachers, memorabilia of the school. Indeed, for schoolchildren, the study of many other subjects is understandable. For example, it's understandable, that mathematics and Russian must be taught because without them you will not get a certificate (mandatory). Physics, chemistry and computer science should be studied at least by those who are going to engage in technical or natural science areas (and there are quite a few of them now). Social science should be studied by the humanities and everyone in general, because we will all live in modern society and must understand the basics of its functioning. English should be studied by everyone because we live in interact in global world, which is regularly getting closer, whether we like it or not.
But why study history?
After all, practically no one is going to take this subject to the OGE or the Unified State Examination for a university, and it has not yet been made mandatory, although today they again say that it will be introduced from 2019. Who cares what happened a thousand or even 100 years ago? Why do we need to memorize these ancient names and dates? After all, history is not a science at all. Depending on political views and cultural paradigm (liberal, conservative, globalist), assessments of historical events and figures can change radically.
There are several options for how to answer such questions.
One can answer this question on the basis of the assertion that history is an important science for human society.. This can help the teacher a large number of statements of thinkers and figures about the importance of history. For example:
People who do not know their past have no future. M. Lomonosov
I don't know any other way to judge the future than by the past. — Patrick Henry
History repeats itself, that's one of its flaws - C. Darrow
History is an unchanging play, played by more and more actors. A. Monterlan
He who does not remember his past is condemned to relive it . - D. Santayana
The universal law - the law of laws - is the law of succession, for what is the present, in the final analysis, if not the sprout of the past? - W. Whitman
Take away history from the people - and in a generation they will turn into a crowd, and in another generation they can be controlled like a herd. - Joseph Goebbels
History is the most the best teacher who has the worst students — Indira Gandhi.
In fact, these statements say that the past and future of mankind are inextricably linked by the historical process. The subject of the study of history is the historical process itself: that is, the process of changes that occur in society as it develops in different areas: political, social, economic, spiritual, etc., as well as the process of changing our ideas and assessments of past events. Now we are well aware that our ideas about the past can change significantly. These changes in society can occur very slowly. Sometimes it can be hundreds or thousands of years. Thus, the processes that affect us today began hundreds and thousands of years ago and can develop for more than one century.
This temporary historical process is reflected in the figure. What we have nowpresent, is the result of the influence of phenomena and processes that took place in the past, and most of these processes have not ended, but continue now and will affect our future, creating various options for its development. Therefore, in order to understand the future and plan some actions to change it, we often have to go back to the origins of these processes centuries ago.
Well at one time Woland said to Berlioz in the novel The Master and Margarita. “In order to manage the world, a person must have a plan and the possibility of its execution, at least for a minimally short period of time - a thousand years.” This is the average duration of historical processes. For example, 1.5-2 thousand years, this is the usual historical cycle of the development of a local civilization, if it was not crushed from the outside.
Thus, if a person does not know the past and cannot analyze it, he cannot understand either his present or his future. He is like an ignorant bull tied by the nose with a ring. The chain was wrapped around a peg and now the huge bull stands motionless and cannot figure out the reason for its stop and torment. Can't understand to get free,
he needs to move back.
Good example. Have you ever wondered what kind of historical order we live in now? At one time, Marx and Engels counted 5 socio-economic formations through which mankind passed: primitive society, slave-owning society, feudalism, capitalism and socialism (which was not fully realized). How can you call the socio-economic structure of the modern information, post-industrial society? Can we call it capitalism? or is it already some kind of new transitional form from capitalism to a new social order of the 21st century? (how the transitional form from feudalism to capitalism developed in the 17th-18th centuries) Can we say that now we are witnessing similar transitional revolutionary processes, as in the 17th-18th centuries, which makes our social relations unstable and oscillating between old and new trends? (breaking the old social relations developed over the centuries, creating a new way of life) Thus, having studied the transitional processes of the 17th-18th centuries, we can understand and evaluate much better what is happening now and what can happen tomorrow? Analytical institutions around the world are working on such questions. And despite all this, people are bad students, and history is a bad teacher for humanity. People are ready to discard historical lessons in the name of their momentary, mercantile goals. For some reason, it always seems to a person that everything will be different with him, his situation is not at all like that of others. However, history is an unchanging play, which is played by more and more actors. And it would be nice to know the key points and the general scenario of this play.
A historian can also answer this question from the position of our state.
The state (and in fact the whole society as a whole) is interested in the formation of the civic identity of people leaving school and entering into full-fledged rights of citizens of our society. This civic identity consists of many components, including the historical and geographical image of our state (how did we become such,
who we are, what are our features), mastering the general cultural heritage of Russia and its place in the global heritage, emotionally positive acceptance of one's ethnic identity and knowledge of the history of one's ethnic group, respect and acceptance of other peoples of their history
In modern conditions of a total information war, a person who does not have such an ideological base becomes its victim and a toy of manipulation, unable to distinguish historical facts from profanities and fakes. In this information war, history is used as a weapon and a person who does not know history is like a soldier sitting in a trench without a cartridge against advancing enemies. This problem has been well shown by recent events in Ukraine and their reflection in Europe and America.
That is why our state and society include history in compulsory USE giving our youth the opportunity to protect their consciousness from manipulation in the information war.
However, it is difficult to expect that any or both of these arguments will convince the modern student, who is focused on his immediate environment and immediate plans and is far from global pictures. Therefore, I would like to offer several other arguments that, in my opinion, are more acceptable to the modern student ...
One can answer this question in terms of the importance of studying history for the formation of self-awareness and identity of the student's personality.
Adolescence is an important stage in the formation of a person's self-awareness, awareness of their characteristics.Self-awareness (I-concept)
is the totality of all the ideas a person has about himself. They includeI am the past, I am the present, I am the future
, as well asI am real
(what I am currently) andI am perfect
(what I would like and should become). In addition, a teenager develops moral, moral and ethical standards, which form the basis of his I-ideal concept. These norms are formed as a result of personal-intimate communication in the family and at school. However, for the complete formation of these norms, a narrow circle of communication of a teenager is not enough. Much more diverse examples of situations of human behavior are needed, on the basis of which a teenager accepts and builds his own norms. These examples of situations a teenager today can take from the media (including the Internet), fiction and history.
This is where problems arise. Our media mainly focuses on sensational and negative news and patterns of behavior, while relegating positive behavioral patterns to the background, creating a distorted picture of the world and a system of values in a person (especially a young and fragile one).
Fiction includes many positive images. However, all these images are not real, living people, but typological images modeled by writers. Thus, these images and the situations in which they act are clearly modeled and deviate from reality, which limits the possibility of their acceptance by schoolchildren.
The study of history provides adolescents with rich material with real people, transgressions and situations that have occurred in our society over the centuries. Despite the fact that not all situations can be shifted to today, historical situations seriously expand the window of possible solutions for today's teenagers. It turns out that a person could have a completely different set of values, not like now, different peoples and times there were different customs and attitudes. At the same time, it may surprise you that there are values for all peoples that have not changed for thousands of years.
For example, one of them is the problem of fathers and children. In 720 BC Hesiod wrote: "I have lost all hope for the future of our country if the youth of today take the reins of government into their own hands, for this youth is unbearable, unrestrained, simply terrible!" Nothing has changed in the age-old problem of fathers and children until now.
Thus, acquaintance with history is in the interests of the student. It allows a teenager to expand the set of situations and norms of behavior for analysis and the formation of self-awareness and self-determination in an important period for him. If he does not do this, then he is likened to a cockroach that sits in a jar and does not want to crawl out, although the lid has already been removed.
However, the historian can also use a simpler and more powerful argument. The story can be considered as an interesting detective story, fascinating to read. And sometimes the real twists that occur in history are much cooler than any plots invented by writers. And the mysteries of history capture people no less than detective stories and romantic stories.
When a historian begins to unearth some historical problem, he encounters much more difficulties than a detective who takes a new case and arrives at the scene of a crime. The detective in the vast majority of cases can find and interrogate witnesses (direct and indirect - the witness said something to someone), the historian usually does not have living witnesses. (they died hundreds and thousands of years ago) All that remains of them is some historical sources in which they describe events, to some extent, and the historian cannot ask them - "what did you mean in this place?" (and the sources were written in an ancient, often dead language, by people whose consciousness and interests we do not understand well and have been rewritten many times during this time, each time losing some of the information). Sometimes even no historical sources about the event are left. It was either the pre-written period, or the language of the source has not yet been deciphered, or the delayed sources have not reached our time.
A detective can come to the place of an event, make an investigative experiment, and the picture of the event becomes more or less clear. A historian usually cannot do this, because the place of the event is unknown (for example, they are still looking for a specific place where the famous Battle of Kulikovo took place) or it has already been changed - there are no cities anymore, buildings have been destroyed, and something new has been built on this site , the historical landscape is changed. You can try to extract something from this place with the help of archeology, dendrological dating and radiocarbon dating. However, the possibilities of archeology itself are very limited. Happiness is when archaeological and written sources complement each other.
The historian can also apply linguistic methods, draw on modern genealogy and other sciences, and analyze the collected ethnographic material. However, these are all crude methods that do not give unambiguous and indisputable answers.
Thus the task of understanding the event is much more difficult for the historian than for the modern detective. Well said -The story begins when nothing can be verified anymore. V. Verkhovsky And this task can be mysterious and fascinating not only for a professional historian, but also for any student who is interested in some fact and would like to understand the events of the past and its connections with the present. Moreover, the farther the event is from our time, the more complex and ambiguous this task becomes. That is why one can see that historians do not have a common opinion on many problematic issues of history. There may be several points of view, each of which has the right to exist. Moreover, at any moment some new previously unknown historical source may open, which will change the whole alignment of forces and opinions about the event. Here is such a special and volatile science - History. And this is already superimposed on the features of the political moment and the ideological interests of the ruling elite of the state. As the saying goes: "History is too serious a matter to be left to historians."".
Nowadays, more and more non-professional people are addicted to history. The movement of historical reenactors of all eras is actively developing. More and more festivals are being held. There are already permanent thematic permanent settlements where you can come to live for a weekend or vacation. Children's camps of reenactors are opened.
All more enthusiasts are interested in alternative history, go on their own expeditions and pose more and more questions to professional historians. This year, the first scientific dispute between Egyptologists, representatives of official science and enthusiasts of the laboratory of alternative history "Supertechnologies against copper and stone" took place.".
Experimental archeology is being actively developed by enthusiasts. We now have a better understanding of what ancient people could have done with their tools and how they made them.
Today there is an opportunity to get involved in the fascinating process of studying and discovering history for anyone, from schoolchildren to adults. And you can start with the usual school lessons, additional questions and disputes on interesting and problematic topics. Come, let's figure it out!
Many of us have no idea what happened in the past and how it might affect our present and future. History is not just a school subject. This is our pride, our shame and our secret. We cannot erase the history of past generations, but we can extract a lot valuable lessons from the history. That's why it's so important to start studying history.
1. Know the past.
Few people care what people have done in the past. You shouldn't dwell on the past, but isn't it interesting to know what happened a thousand years ago? Isn't it interesting to know the life history of your ancestor? History plays an important role in our life. Helps us to avoid the most dangerous mistakes that people made many years ago.
2. Admit mistakes.
Recent events can teach us many valuable lessons. When we recognize our own, we can avoid them or fight them. We can avoid conflicts, wars, the Holocaust, Holodomor, and many other terrible events that happened in the past. We cannot change the present and the future without knowing the past.
3. Understand past generations.
Mine once said, “If your great-grandmother was alive, she would have laughed at our ways of life.” I was interested in learning more facts about past generations and understanding why they had different priorities in life and what goals they had.
4. Understand modern society.
There is a thin line between past and present. What happened many years ago can affect what is happening today. Learn about the events that helped shape the lives of your ancestors, as well as yours. own life. This will help you understand modern society better.
5. It's incredibly interesting.
Have you ever wanted to know more about women from history, ancient buildings or famous battles? The history is incredibly interesting. Pick an aspect of the story that completely intrigues you and pick up as many history books as you can read. This may become your new hobby. History is not boring when you love what you read.
6. Understand how life has changed over the years.
Do you know about the events that led to the first and second world wars? We know about these wars, but we hardly know the reasons. Life is changeable, but the only thing that can help us understand those changes is history. Events happen at an ever-increasing pace. Studying history is an easy way to be in tune with the present.
7. Know the most prominent people.
Kings, queens, sailors, rulers, scientists, artists and many others prominent people did a lot for us. Yes, some of them did terrible, disgusting and terrible things, like the death penalty, but in general we have a lot of things thanks to them. Remembering their names is one of the best ways to be grateful for what they have done.
8. Find inspiration.
Finally, history is a fantastic source of inspiration. History can inspire you to create an event that will change your future. family life or your society. She may also inspire you to become the best person and find your true calling in life. History has helped many people discover their talents and develop new skills. Who knows, maybe he can help you too.
History is very important to us. I didn't like history at school. For me was one of the worst items. Now that I understand how important history is to us, I take the time to read history books. After all, one day we will all be someone else's story, so let's not forget the past and create a happy future.