Before reading “Why History Matters” I was already aware of the fact that it is, and needed no convincing. I knew history is important, but I knew it for mainly one reason; learning about our history helps us to learn from our mistakes/successes in order to go forward into the future. While reading this article I realized not only that there are people who still believe History doesn’t matter, or simply wonder why it does matter at all.
Cornfield brings up the idea that History allows us to explore new topics without having to learn everything new again. She says about how “the human mind can and does explore much wider terrain than does the human body”. Not only does History allow people to have so much more information then what is put right in front of them, but it gives them a framework to understand and make sense of the information. I found this interesting because Cornfield highlights how it is the job of educationalists to have students analyze a subject fully by understanding the history of a topic and the ways it may have changed or been challenged. The idea that History is much more than past events that helps us learn, but how we can learn from how we are living in it now is important to realize moving forward.
I had the same thought as you did when I looked at the title of the reading. I already knew history matter simply because it is how we learn from our mistakes. A good quote that I thought about throughout the article is “history never repeats itself but it rhymes” by Mark Twain.
I also found the author’s take on educationalists teaching history to their students very interesting as well. It is indeed their job to make it exciting and collaborative, not just the memorization of facts. I believe if all history classes were taught with the central focus on the whole process of historical events and how they influenced others, rather than a single date/fact/person/name with a definition, students would understand the content much better and be more inclined to do something with that information, whether to use it in the present or connect to another time in history, rather than just forget about a single fact they had to know for a test.
I agree with everything you mentioned in this post. Corfield’s article really resonated with me because I dreaded when History teachers would lecture us on dates and facts, so I used to agree with Henry Ford’s statement that, “History is bunk. However, adding on to Julia and your comments’, I now feel like I have a newfound appreciation for History because if History is taught in a correlative manner with other time periods, it becomes evident that events in our current time period directly relate to the past and influence our future.