Issue221， 学习历史的真正意义，三天三天三天！！

shadow1987UID: 2605840

TOPIC: ISSUE221 - "The chief benefit of the study of history is to break down the illusion that people in one period of time are significantly different from people who lived at any other time in history."
WORDS: 401
TIME: 00:45:00
DATE: 2010-8-8 0:07:03

In this era, social and technological changes bring about a complex world wherein everything including ourselves has changed dramatically. Therefore, it is in accordance to the common sense that the people in one period time are significantly different from the people who lived in another time. However, I believe the idea above is just an illusion and I totally agree with the speaker's claim that we can benefit from studying history through the belief that we have a lot of characteristics which in common with the people in the past. The reasons can be divided into the subjective aspect and the objective aspect.

In the first place, we actually are not significantly different from the ancestors in the spiritual world. We can still benefit from thinking about their ideas and values even these thoughts might not fit in our modern society. For example, Qin Shihuang, who is the first emperor in Chinese history, built numerous imperial palaces to meet his personal needs. Meanwhile, the huge projects cost a large amount of human resource and money which were exploited from people. Under his governing, people's lives are painful and miserable, even so, our ancestors seem menial and held the belief that the emperor is the son of divinity and he deserves them to sacrifice for. In this case, although the people who live in that period hold the different opinion with us, we can learn the significance of democrat from the story. If our countries and we lose the democratic spirit, we will suffer the same affliction.

On the other hand, our living conditions and environment are also not significantly different from the people in the past.
For instance, in 2003, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) raged through China. Unfortunately, the officials from Chinese Health Ministry did not place enough emphasis on this issue and even lied to the public. Consequently, as we all known, this behaviors led to terrible aftermath, and as the result, relative officials took the blame and resigned. Consider, even the Chinese people are not suffering SARS at this moment; it is awfully possible for another disease rage our homeland again in the future. At that time, if we have not learnt the experience from SARS and make the same mistake, the history will happen again. Hence, in my view, our objective conditions remain stable.

However, some people might argue that we should look forward, cause we have been changing even in every second, in other words, the today's me is different from the yesterday's. I must concede this point of view is reasonable, nonetheless, we should be clear that why we are studying history? Why this old story stay in our text books and history is an indispensable discipline in our basic education? That is because we can learn the truth form history and benefit from these truths in modern society. Perhaps, the inventions would be out-of-date and the events would never happen again, but we human beings are all the same throughout the history and carry the same nature.

To sum up, fundamentally, the people from different time will never be significantly different from each other, and base on this belief can we learn the truths and experiences from our history.
In my view, that is the chief benefit of studying history.

hyacinthUID: 2184492

try to relate two time period together in one example... otherwise, you are just comparing one real example to your assumption, which is not convincing...

if you dont show the similarity between two actual events with a big time difference at least in one of your examples, why would i believe your point?

shadow1987UID: 2605840

2# hyacinth

Oops, indeed, that make sense!