【☆09GRE作文冲刺组☆】liuhantony.2.20号作业issue103

liuhantony2UID: 2597441

TOPIC: ISSUE103 - "The study of history has value only to the extent that it is relevant to our daily lives."
WORDS: 668
TIME: 00:45:00
DATE: 2009-2-20

I disagree with the speaker's general contention that history must be relevant to our everyday life in order to have merit. It's true that a understanding of history facts involving solutions to past daily life problems will be of help to solving similar problems today and have a direct and obvious benefit to human by giving an answer to their daily problem. Yet by taking into the complexity of problems human encounter in all facets of society, study of history for a higher level of knowledge--ideology, philosophy, etc, is necessary because of the general enlightenment they have on settling various problems, even if they are indeed far from people's daily life.

On one hand, it is undeniable that history study of daily issues will show us some alternatives in solving today's similar problem, considering human nature did not change a lot during the past centuries. In fact, history has provided us with convincing proof that for many times, human society met the same daily problem generated by nature or human themselves. Thus, cases of dealing with these daily problems, no matter they are successful or failed, offered us valuable experience of possible approaches to improve our behavior when encounter such situation in daily life. For example, after the industrial revolution, the labor force has a sharp increase and is never a dispensable component of society. Nevertheless, workers then lead a miserable life, which served as a potential threat to the stability of society. To address this threat, German government passed laws establishing the first social welfare system in human society, including minimum wage and government allowance and this method successfully erase the potential threat to society. As a consequence, the social welfare system is learned and established in every modern nation, helping people go through the difficult times and feel the attention as well as assistance from the government. Therefore, what history taught human about systems and regulation to improve daily life is of great value.

On the other hand, the undue over emphasize of the study of daily life in history might limit people's horizon and prevent them from handling problems with more complexity. Anyway, the pure problem of daily life mainly concerns basic need of people to survive and at most, how to live better.
But the understanding of these individual problems is merely helpful when we encounter the exact the same or at least almost the same problem in current society, since people will only have a superficial understanding of the phenomenon rather than the true rules and laws behind. But it is unfortunately not likely the case. A convincing illustration is the President Hoover's response to the Great Depression. When the wall street collapse occurred, president Hoover unfairly treat the crisis as a failure speculation and believe that the market itself is more than capable to solve it, as it did before. Nevertheless, this partial recognition based on the phenomenon of the past rather than the universal economic laws failed the confidence of president Hoover, leading to the most severe social depression in the US history. Therefore, the mere focus on the daily problem itself of history study is far from enough to address some unexpected complex current problem in daily life different from what took place in the past.

In addition, the knowledge of a higher level about the exploration made for the ultimate rules of nature and society given by history study is even more crucial. Only by having a depth exploration of human society for their universal rules can we obtain the power to fully inherit wisdom of our ancestors and address problems or a more various kind. The history of philosophy, for instance, reveals how people in the past gradually discover and develop their thoughts about both the ultimate nature about world and human themselves based on reason and logic. Through such attempt, philosophers in the past invented different kinds of thinking patterns used for settling different kinds of questions. Albeit those abstract thinking patterns are far from directly solving problems we encountered in daily life, they are basis of innovative possible approaches towards that very aim. Consequently, study of history of more abstract knowledge such as philosophy and art point out for us a universal rule and direction to address even the most practical problem in daily life, although they are not obviously related on the surface.(这点没在限时内写出来，后来补的，开头编提纲编了12分钟...唉)

In final analysis, I would point out that although study about daily life in history helps solve current daily life problems, a understanding about the ultimate rule of human society is even more important. Anyway, what human benefit most from the study of history is not a single method fit for one certain problem, but a general thought to address problems of a kind.