Why分析和总结分析和总结.pdfVIP

Why Study History? By Peter N. Stearns People live in the present. They plan for and worry about the future. History, however, is the study of the past. Given all the demands that press in from liv ing in the present and anticipating what is yet to come, why bother with what has been? Given all the desirable and available branches of knowledge, why i nsist—as most American educational programs do—on a good bit of history? A nd why urge many students to study even more history than they are require d to? Any subject of study needs justification: its advocates must explain why it is worth attention. Most widely accepted subjects—and history is certainly one o f them—attract some people who simply like the information and modes of th ought involved. But audiences less spontaneously drawn to the subject and m ore doubtful about why to bother need to know what the purpose is. Historians do not perform heart transplants, improve highway design, or arres t criminals. In a society that quite correctly expects education to serve useful purposes, the functions of history can seem more difficult to define than thos e of engineering or medicine. History is in fact very useful, actually indispens ble, but the products of historical study are less tangible, sometimes less imm ediate, than those that stem from some other disciplines. In the past history has been justified for reasons we would no longer accept. For instance, one of the reasons history holds its place in current education is because earlier leaders believed that a knowledge of certain historical facts he lped distinguish the educated from the uneducated; the person who could reel off the date of the Norman conquest of England (1066) or the name of the p erson who came up with the theory of evolution at about the same time that Darwin did (Wallace) was deemed superior—a better candidate for law school or even a business promotion. Knowledge of historical facts has been used as a screeni