A student who learns about the achievements, artworks, and progress of past generations will realise that they all equally contribute to the collective history of humankind
Students learn to evaluate the veracity of their sources, notice bias, and identify propaganda. They learn to read between the lines and to know that what is omitted and not said can be as informative as what is in plain sight. Therefore, I tell my students, nullius in verba, the motto of the Royal Society: do not take anyone’s opinion and words for granted. Question everything, including and especially, your teachers. The history classroom is a great place to practice critical thinking in an unrestricted environment.
Open-mindedness goes hand-in-hand with having empathy and the ability for critical thinking. The world is becoming more and more segregated into cliques and the more one learns about differences, they become a tool for advocating “otherness” and separation, instead of diversification and enrichment. A student who learns about the achievements, artworks, and progress of past generations will realise that they all equally contribute to the collective history of humankind and that there are no “superior” nor “inferior” nations, cultures, religions, languages, and traditions. Furthermore, they will realise that no single country or nation can use history as a justification, a right, or an excuse to commit atrocities against other peoples and countries.
To add as a conclusion, history is simply fun. Fun, if one does not take the life out of it by narrowing it down to disconnected names and years, that in the grand scheme of things, mean nothing without the proper context. For instance, if I tell you that the first fax machine was invented in 1843, it means nothing to you. However, this is the time when Saigo Takamori, the last samurai of Japan was alive. Therefore, a Japanese samurai could have sent a fax both to young Queen Victoria in England and the president of the USA, a country less than a century old. What could have been the topic of this fax? Well, two decades before the fax machine was invented, Mary Shelley wrote her novel Frankenstein and the genre of science fiction was born. We would never know without consulting our sources, but the time and place are right for an international book club on science fiction between Japanese samurai and rulers of new and old countries.