What the Future Holds From the Past by Anthony

What the Future Holds From the Past by Anthony - October 2016 Scholarship Essay

Regardless of the career path, there’s some classes that are pretty impractical. It’s not as if logarithmic functions are everyday occurrences for your average pediatrician, or anyone for that matter. Adversely, there are some classes that will affect us for the rest of our lives. World History, in my eyes, is one class that has the power to change the world and would be the class I would love to teach.
My world history teacher is a man who I have the utmost respect for. I learned things that I will never forget: a song to remember Chinese dynasties, the abnormality that was the Mongols, and how to write a solid DBQ, but the most important lesson I received was the ability to make connections. To better support our arguments, we were taught to ask for a source that wasn’t included in our list of documents. The source we could use for anything was the Chinese peasant woman; as china was always relevant, rarely were there documents from the poor, and most documents would be written by men. A lot of people outside of the class would question where the connection was between a Chinese peasant woman and the fall of the Aztecs, which is extremely understandable. And this is where world history shines. One only has to look back to Marco Polo’s travel to make the connection of how Europeans craved the goods made from China, which led to the need for quicker trade routes, and thus the “ discovery” of the Americas which in turn led to Spain destroying the Aztecs. And that’s why world history is so great, it can help show us that things are not as simple as they seem on the surface.
The ability to do this is something that I think we as a people have lost. In recent history, something bad would happen and we choose to act first and find out why later. We take each of these incidents as if it’s something entirely new rather than a completion of a cycle. As George Santayana once said, “ Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” As an example, many people will look at the problems faced by the people of Liberia and assume it’s all their fault. The key word in that sentence being all. However, with world history, people are able to understand how things like the triangular trade are able to affect their situation today. Understanding is the one thing that can help prevent the problems we face today. We are so quick to blame our problems on trivial things such as the amount of melatonin in the body or assuming the actions of the few account for the many. If kids worldwide were given access to a quality world history education, they would be able to piece these things together and understand each other better.
I understand how optimistic that sounds, but I truly believe in the importance of world history. Perhaps it’s not the class that will create a lot of careers, but it’s a class that can make a change. World history changed my perspective on certain topics which is why I’m so adamant about its teaching. So if there was any class that I would teach, world history, a.k.a What was China doing at this time, would be the one.