Have you ever sat in your history class and wondered how your point of view would change about the world if you had never learned about history? History is important to our society, it is an essential part in understanding how humans work. There are different approaches to how history is taught although not all of them are good. But how you learn is what molds your thoughts and ideas about modern history. I had a chance to interview students and a teacher about how being educated in history can benefit you.

I asked sophomore Isabella Bernal-Stough at what grade do you think should be taught the most. “I think it’s really important to teach history and they should offer at younger grades more classes about politics and how the government works and not about things in the past that happened over 1000 years ago.” This shows that some students want to learn more about managing their future, which I agree with. This brings an opportunity to change the path of history we are going through. Although thinking about our future is important, we still have to know about our past.

To talk about the past, I had a chance to interview junior Marycarmen Louis, I asked her why she thinks being educated about history is important she said, “If you aren’t educated about the past, you won’t be able to learn from past mistakes and history is bound to repeat itself and we can remake the same mistakes.” An especially important part of history is our past, in our modern world sometimes we forget about past mistakes as a society and fall right into them. Therefore, being educated about history can help us prevent mistakes. Apart from learning about history, it is also the way we learn it.

Mentioning teaching history I talked to Mr. Hinh one of our US History and AP World teachers I asked how do you think the way history is taught affects how you view the world he said “The way we see the world depends on how we see people, history helps us understand why people do what they do and the reasons [for their actions] makes sense to them.” The way we are taught about history is also a very important about how we view the world. If we know the actions of people, we are bound to understand everyone’s points of view and be more neutral. We would also be able to form our own thoughts with the information we are given.

I asked everyone I interviewed the same question do you think being uneducated about history could cause racism they all had a similar answer to summarize they all said it could correlate because if you don’t know about history you don’t know why people do what they did. So, a group of people could be associated with a choice that seems bad, but it was what they thought was right. Then this group gets stereotyped into these actions which correlates with racism.

This group of individuals had similar opinions about the importance of history. Therefore, being undedicated about it gives you a large disadvantage. When you are able to understand the past you can mold the future and make choices to improve it.