When teachers of history admit that their best efforts at understanding the past are
only tentative and sure to be altered in time to come, skeptics are likely to conclude
that history has no right to take student time from other subjects. If what is taught
today is not really true, how can it claim space in a crowded school curriculum?
But what if the world is more complicated and diverse than words can ever tell? What
if human minds are incapable of finding' neat pigeon holes into which everything that
happens will fit? What if we have to learn to live with uncertainty and probabilities,
and act on the basis of the best guesswork we are capable of? Then, surely, the
changing perspectives of historical understanding are the very best introduction we
can have to the practical problems of real life. Then, surely, a serious effort to
understand the interplay of change and continuity in human affairs is the only
adequate introduction human beings can have to the confusing flow of events that
constitutes the actual, adult world.
Since that is the way the world is, it follows that study of history is essential for every
young person. Systematic sciences are not enough. They discount time, and therefore
oversimplify reality, especially human reality. Current events are not enough either.
Destined to almost instant obsolescence, they foreshorten and thereby distort the
time dimension within which human lives unfold and, thanks to memory, are