【TRANSFORMER】_ISSUE103_0809

灵感女孩UID: 2224424

103"The study of history has value only to the extent that it is relevant to our daily lives."

灵感女孩UID: 2224424

Asserting that the study of history is valuable only when it is relevant to our daily lives underrates the value of history when it contributes to aspects such as politics, national defense, advanced technologies that might not be useful today but significant in the future. History, a mirror of past human lives, provides us much more.

When we talk about history, most people would think of the perssissitudes of nations, and how political leaders put  
into much effort in establishing and enforcing their powers. Indeed, studying history will guide political leaders to avoid making mistakes their precedents had already committed, and learn the essence of governance. The father of America, first president of the United States, George Washington, suppressed all attemps by his officers'persuasion to establish a military dictatorship or be crowned king. After two terms of presidency, he stepped down and refused to be reelected given his reputation. If Washington had not have learnt from failures of military totalitarians and tyrannies in countries in Africa and Latin America, he would not have been successful in enforcing the democratic system for the new America.

The study of history is not only of great value to political leaders, but also crucial to areas such as national defense, far from our daily life. Just this month, India announced that it just finished building the country's first self-designed nuclear powered submarine and the submarine will be in operation in 2011. It is then crucial for the Indian Navy to learn from previous accidents of nuclear powered submarines such as the explosion of the Russian Kursk in 2000,  which decimated 118 sailors and officers, or the collision of French and English submarines just last year. Only by learning from past mistakes can the Indian Navy find a way to avoid such tragedies happening on themselves.

Aside from politics and national defense, the study of history of the sciences will enable human beings to explore new ways of treating diseases or finding new homes for the increasing population. A study of the history of AIDS pathogen will not necessarily improve the daily life researchers, but its potential significance for the future generation of a better way to treat AIDS is not neglectable. Another example can be found as the NASA, by analyzing and retrospecting history of humans first experience on the moon in 1969, is trying to make another attempt to explore this familiar yet still mysterious planet. This project is not closely related to our daily life now, but might be extremely useful in searching another home for future generations.

However, we also cannot ignore the importance studying history contributes us to our daily lives. A thorough study of the case of SARS, which took lives of many in 2003, can help medical institutes and center for disease control and prevention in the whole  world today to quench the spread of H1N1 virus. Economically, studying cases of the financial crises in the 1980s in Latin America and the 1997 Asian Crisis can help economics today better assess the current situation and help us to extricate from this predicament.

To sum up, indeed, the study of history is valuable if it is relavant to our quanrine life, yet it is not only to this extant that it is valuable. By learning from the past experiences of our ancestors, politicians, military officers, scientific researchers, and many others can benefit from the study to better contribute to a variety of areas, far beyond our daily lives, and well to the future.

yesrushUID: 2443769

TOPIC: ISSUE103 - "The study of history has value only to the extent that it is relevant to our daily lives."
WORDS: 585          TIME: 00:45:00          DATE: 2009-8-9 17:22:23

The students, no matter where they are, are required to study history in childhood. The speaker alleges that the study of history should be focus on the sphere where it is relevant to our daily lives. I find this allegiance to be specious. It wrongly suggests that some history is not totally related with our modern society. To the contrast, not only history has the direct or indirect relationship with our daily lives, but also it is favorable riches that we can mind to improve ourselves and instruct our behavior.

To begin with, albeit seldom does history have a direct relevant to our modern life, most history make a tremendous influence on our life in an indirect way. The world is a seamless net where one business looks like detached from but actually touch another. In the science field, Watt, who lived in European two hundreds years ago, invented the stream engine, which emancipate persons from the onerous labor and greatly speed up the pace of our society. Another case lies in the education area. Confucius, who was a famous educationist in China thousands of years ago, informed us that "Learning without thinking leads to indiscriminate, and thinking without learning conduces to perilous." which helps the contemporary teachers to understand the weigh of critical thinking and reasoning skill in learning. These two examples present that some history individuals or events, which existed many years ago or in another places, seems isolated to our modern world, nonetheless, our present flourishing  society reap huge fruit form these impact by the history individuals or events.

In addition, human, especially children, can learn moral values from history idols, for the purpose to improve our characters and make us stronger. History is a rich gold, which consists of merits of famous history idols teaching students the moral line stands between good or bad, right or wrong. If we tell children the story of Bruno, who would rather being killed in fire than telling the truth, they can enhance their courage to chase truth. If children hear the Beethoven story from us, they are able to understand the willpower stimulating Beethoven to create an army of symphonies regardless his deafness. If children read the story about the Martin Luther King, they can respect others equally no matter which race they are. In sum, in spite that the history is nothing to do with us, the history is inevitable to serve a means to help children as well as adults to learn the moral merits, thus we can face our life full of courage and intellect.

What's more, history provides us a method of learning the past invaluable experience and therefore better deal with contemporary business. One of the paradigmatic examples is the water pollution in Japanese in 1950th. In this calamity, mercury poisoned the water and takes away the lives of a large amount of persons as well as the creatures in sea. Although this events took effect on merely Japanese area, people all over the world have learn a lot about environmental protection, and consequently enact the legislation and regulation to protect our environment, wishing this similar disaster will not happen again. It is obvious that the events happened in the past will make a recurrence today or future, so those who do not know the past are condemned to repeat it. Taking the precious experience by history into consideration, we should learn history no matter whether the connection between history and us is direct.

In sum, just as Newton says" I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulder of giants". History is a teacher around us, whose influence can not be ignored even though the affect is indirect, and instruct us to emulate the moral value of precursors and also tell us the approach of handling the matters both in the modern life and in future.

blade134UID: 2328542

TOPIC: ISSUE103 - "The study of history has value only to the extent that it is relevant to our daily lives."
WORDS: 451          TIME: 00:45:00          DATE: 2009-8-9 18:07:23

Whether the study of history has value to us is still an argument in these days. The author claims that it has value only if the result of study has some relationship with our lives. Indeed, we can benefit from history only when we know how it can change our lives.

Admittedly, study of history can not create substance wealth as the technology of the human beings has developed all the way. Tomas Edison, one of the greatest inventors in history, had created sufficient inventions to all human being. Some of these, such as light bulb and motion picture camera are still used today. but these inventions have been improved many times until now. Taking light bulb as an example, it has developed from original form to many other kinds of bulb with amazing functions. The x-ray bulb used in medical research to see through one's body with x-ray beam can help doctors find the disease without any physical operations.  From that case we can see the history is just a record of technic innovations, and the development of technologies is too haphazard to make any prediction.

Nevertheless, people can take great advantage from some aspects of history. One of them is the knowledge. In thousands of years passed, our ancients has left many knowledge to us, the weaving craft they used, the architecture how they build the city, the climate change they observed, etc. Some of them still have their own value even though people today have more insightful understandings of things with technology. By studying the history of American Civil War, we can analysis why our ancients had recognized all men are created equal at that period of time, thus we can use a object view of today's racialism. By researching the Napoleonic code made by Napoleon, we can make more appropriate rules to our society because it has a general usability.

Other ones we have benefited from history study are spirits, moral and ethnics. In Edison's case, although many of his inventions are not used in today any more, his sprit of trying again and again until success is still affected many contemporary inventors. According to history record, he had tried more than 1500 materials until he find the most appropriate one for the core of light bulb. Without such decision and persistence, any inventor can not be successful even if depending on the latest technology, that is the eternal value he gives us. Besides, today many Chinese traditions, such as the older and younger ones must be regarded and so forth, are still be obeyed in society. To maintain our social harmony, they are what the authorities need.  

In all, imagine history as a mirror, the study of history will only have value if we can see ourselves in that mirror. See ourselves means progress to us.