People today cannot truly grasp history and fully comprehend (possibly literally) what should be learned from it because it is for many of them, especially the new ones in school, just words on a page.
Nothing educates like experience, like how you can teach a skill from a book but to truly understand it you must practice it, probably poorly at first but better with further action.
History cannot truly be experienced by someone who was not there, whether kept apart by time or distance. We can try to bridge the gap with our spoken and written words, and today maybe a video feed, but it is not the same. Just doesn’t adhere to our fleshy brains the same way.
This also means that “true” historical fact and utter fiction are often indistinguishable. The only difference between a history book and a historical fiction is that we are encouraged by our parents who we trust implicitly, or our teachers they tell us to trust, to believe that one book be the true one over another.
Kids today cannot understand the gravity and lessons of the time before because what they have experienced first hand in their short lives is the only thing they truly know to be real. As for everything else, it would be just as easy to give them an alt-history fiction and convince them we saved our country from actual lizard men. And they would believe it with just as much vigor as any other history lesson.
This is why I think some major issues are easily glossed over by the newest generations. Their entire life experience is based in a world which is not perfect, but also not as bad or the same as the events before. And the accounts of the past just don’t hold the same gravity as their experience of world today, making those who did experience worse and are rightly afraid seem like they are exaggerating. We ask people to feel just as concerned about something they have never lived through and hopefully never will, with the same feeling as those who truly have. And it would be like asking someone to feel like they’ve lived through a novel or movie, because to their brain there is no difference. I feel that’s why there is a struggle to connect and cooperate on these issues.
It doesn’t help that history is malleable because of its apparent intangibility. There is the fear these days that misinformation, propaganda, and AI created fiction can be easily spread along today’s internet, to influence the minds of people everywhere and convince them of non-truths. Politicians and leaders of nations are even at this moment pushing legislation to set the tone of history taught in schools. Should any of this succeed, one generation will know history to have one set of facts, and the next will have another set. They will both hold these facts to be as irrefutably true as any others they’ve learned. I feel that this is so easily possible because of how, fundamentally, the “true” and false histories are cut from the same cloth and leave the same mark on the mind.
Notice how I keep putting “true” history in quotes? It’s because I ask, what is true history? Is it not said that history belongs to the victor? Propaganda, book burnings, internet/information restrictions, statues and landmarks put up and torn down… History is subjective, altered every day to suite a narrative or changing sensibilities. Different countries educate on different perspectives and opinions of the same events, and each is the world truth according to their citizens. This practice continues even into today, with wars going on and different sides with different opinions on why they are happening…and when one is victorious, one side will influence the collective record through alliances old and new, and make that the truth. Eventually. And if that side so happens to be known by the witnesses of the time to be false, then what will become future historical truth, will actually just be fiction.
Or really, all just words on the page, like all history not personally witnessed.
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I’m…not actually sure. You’re right it seems to just be a fact of life. I was recently in a long winded political discussion about the current times, things like the whitewashing of slavery in history and how we seem to be on a road to fascism even though we’ve seen it all before and how people can care so little.
Some alternative facts got invoked that the guy seemed like he truly believed, and when the actual facts were present their sources were challenged and…it led down the rabbit hole of what makes our sources more right than his? Because someone said so?
It clicked for me that propaganda works, he truly believed his version of history, and even my version was just books someone wrote that I was raised to believe were the right ones. I have never been a slave, despite what people are starting to call employment, I have never known a slave. I only believe slavery was a horrible tragedy because a book told me so. I will never share the same level of care on the issue as someone who is or even directly knew someone affected. And with only a different book I could have very easily ended up just like him, as so many already have, believing in race replacement theories and reversals of oppression and whatnot. How can such different concepts both exist as facts? Because neither have true substance, only belief.
I guess all we can do is keep fighting the good fight for knowledge, keep any one side from choosing what we learn, hoping that in a tenuous balance we get the most fair education we can, and, if there is indeed a biological or literal inability to emphasize with recorded history, we need to come up with different ways to teach important concepts without relying on acceptance of history as fact. And/or learn as a society to accept that apathy to a problem is OK as time wears on.
Other than that I’m not sure what we can do. It does seem rather bleak watching society self-destruct over things that seem to have historical warning but it isn’t so clear for others, despite us all technically sharing the same world history. And it’s only getting worse as politics and religions invade our educations(again?).