The importance of history as a curriculum subject.

This post was in part spurred when my doctor asked for my signature on a petition to ban the use of computers in every class, which really is a terrible idea as it does restrict the ability for developing original thought in young minds. Books are where learning should be happening. Which comes around to the subject of history or the increasing lack of it as a school subject.

What is so important about what happened in the past to a load of dead people? Evolution of intelligence and social behavior, in a few words. As a species, we have learned from the triumphs or the mistakes of our ancestors. A person wouldn’t plant fruit bushes in a soggy field as they would die, but rice? Oh yes. Certain behavior patterns have proven to be good for the health and happiness of people over the years. Basic simple things like don’t kill people, take their property, or molest their women.

Yes, molest is a fairly big taboo going right back to when men started to carve out bits of land and claim ownership. Naturally, they wanted to pass the land to their sons but the thing about fatherhood, that is until modern times, is a man could never really be sure if he were the biological father of his own children unless he suppressed women into subservience, hence the huge taboo about molestation of the female person. The more sophisticated the society, strangely enough, the more the danger of molestation happened. Going back to history, say from about 1830 to 1914 there was a big surge in moralism driven by various religions. While this resulted in the virtual cloistering of most women in one way or another, it also resulted in the biggest surge of prostitution, deviant sexual behavior, (I don’t mean homosexuality, which has been around since the dawn of man, but rather nasty and dangerous practices such as auto erotica and pornography to name a couple), sanctimonious behavior, racial discrimination and outright brinkmanship.

So looking back on history, it is easy to identify what was bad and why it didn’t work. Totoal sexual repression of young people was and still is one of the worst choices. Sometimes those instincts break out in the young and then people get hurt. Take a young man and tell him he can’t as much as kiss a girl until he marries one when he may be somewhere in his twenties and that is going to be a tough call. All the sanctimonious preaching in the world will not stop nature any more than the ancient King Canute of old England could  order the tide to stop coming in from his throne on the beach. He gave up when his feet got wet. Of course, if the lapsed youth happens to be famous he and his family will get crucified by the press. Perhaps a better understanding of the intricacies of the lessons history has to offer might have shown these people that what they were insisting upon from their kids was way off to the left field. The number one lesson history teaches is that any form of suppression will ultimately lead to rebellion.

That said, this is a sad day for some people and the press should back off before they do more harm. Yes, someone did a wrong thing as a result of other people doing the wrong thing for what they thought were right reasons. It doesn’t really matter after all these years. What does matter and did back then, is the victims in the case. The lid has been wrenched off the jar of their very modest world and left them exposed. They are the reason this press hounding must stop and the reason why children must be educated properly in all the subjects, so the mistakes of the past are not repeated.

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