issue120 4月作文小组3月28日第三次作业 by寂寞樱花

寂寞樱花UID：2306511

TOPIC: ISSUE120 - "So much is new and complex today that looking back for an understanding of the past provides little guidance for living in the present."
WORDS: 487          TIME: 2:40:39          DATE: 2007-3-28

提纲：1、开头：基本不同意作者观点。
      2、历史对于加深某一学科的学习有帮助。
      3、历史成败借鉴的意义。
      4、历史的借鉴是有限的，历史成功不代表现在也成功，历史不成功不代表现在也不成功。
      5、总结：历史对于我们今天的学习和生活都还有重要的作用，但不是绝对的。

Even though this is a rapid social leading to increasing life complexity and variety while history offers few foolproof panaceas for living today, from my stand point, the author's claim that today's society is so unique with which the past is  irrelative is too radical which I cannot agree with.

To begin with, understanding the past help us to learn some subjects in-depth, regardless it is natural science, social science or art. Through studying the works of the past, people will know what has already achieved in the realm and what needs solving, or, in other words, how perfect has the subjects been researched and if there needs anything to be done to consummate it. So people who study philosophy should study Kant's critique of pure reason, and students learn in arts must start with copying the classics. Understanding of the past facilitates learning and research nowadays.

Moreover, there is no innovation without understanding of the accomplishment in the past, which is the foundation of innovation. Development is a cycle of accumulating and innovating, in which we suspect the theories of the past and then innovate, and create improved ones, and so do our descendants. That is one of the reasons to explain that why understanding of the past is also important in today though they look old fashioned.

Studying history can also help us avoid repeating mistakes that have been made in the past while use the successful experience in the history for reference to serve ourselves. For example, the failures in inventing machines that without using energy and establishing or finding a perfect society which called Utopia in the past suggests us not to make the same mistakes. On the other hand, the success of Einstein of challenging the classic laws in physics of Newton also tells us that skepticism is indispensable for research in science. Without these lessons and experiences, our society would not be so efficiently like it is at present.

Otherwise, history is also limited, and it is not omnipotent. Surely, we can draw many experiences from it, but our society today is much different from the one of our father's. And conditions today are so complex and changing rapidly. Not all of the successful experience in the history will succeed as same as it was, on the contrary, the methods which our ancestor have not attempted does not mean it will not succeed in the present society. For instance, the running of two systems of polity is unique in China on the problem of taking back Hong Kong without any precedents to follow is now demonstrated to be succeed, or the country will not unify so fast. Beside politics, using of statistics to find out the laws of genetics firstly by Mendel shows that none using does not mean impossible.

As a result, understanding of the past will enhance society today because history is a chain to connect ancestor and offspring, which is to say, past, present and future are not isolated, they has connections in a delicate way. However, history is not the Bible, to which we need not imitate, for past is the history of present and present is the history of future.