Why We Remember

Many kids ask, when in a history class, why we have to learn what happened in the past, because most teachers would respond saying, "To help you through life." Many high school students couldn't see history helping them through life, but it does.

One thing history has done for itself is repeat and repeat again. What happens a country gets mad at another and starts a war, they come up with a faulty treaty, like the Dales Plan to help Germany pay their debts after WWI which eventually caused Germany to see that they could never get out of debt and start another war.

European wars seemed to always repeat themselves, so did the good times vs. the bad times in history. One such example the economy goes up and it goes down. People have had their rough times and their good times with money.

So that goes back to the question, why learn history. It will repeat itself and if you know and understand the solutions that worked or failed in the past, you'll be able to come up with and educated solution making the outcome so much better.

Now, we aren't all going to become politicians but our own personal history seems to repeat itself, doesn't it? We go to school, we take classes others have, and what do we do, we ask them what would be the best way to get an "a" in the class, that's the past, that's history.

We also have the drama at school that, unfortunately seems to pop up every year. One such problem is two friends liking the same guy and both thinking he likes her. Then they get in a fight, don't talk for a few weeks and magically they become friends again, when they decide the guy is a jerk and turn on him.

What about sports? Don't we see what plays work, and which ones didn't catch the team the win? Doesn't MV football study their game to see what they could do better for the next. That's the past and it's helping for the future. Don't people compare the 1996 BYU Football team with todays and see what can be done better to secure more wins?

It's simple the choices we make in our daily lives can be because of events that happened in the past that we want to repeat or avoid at all costs.