I have been looking round locally with the intention of taking evening classes to gain a history A level. There doesn’t seem to be any available, anywhere, no one seems to be running them. Has history gone out of fashion, is there a lack of interest or is it just a lack of funds?
I know history seems a bit of an odd choice of subject for someone who works with his hands but I work with history all the time. The anvils I use are probably over a hundred years old, one that I own personally is well over a hundred years old, (it has a beautiful ring to it when struck with a hammer) some of my tools belonged to my grandfather, he died in 1978 aged 84 and most of his tools were old then.
History for me is not just about wars, dates of battles and the names of monarchs, it is about how things, were why they were, why things are now and how they might be in the future because of how things are now and were before. It strikes me that we cannot plan for the future if we haven’t learned the lessons from the past, if we neglect the past, are we failing to plan for the future?
The man who chairs the Federal Reserve Bank in America, Ben Bernanke studied the Great Depression, its causes and effects. This knowledge of this particular piece of history has helped shape the policies he has followed in trying to prevent a repitition
of another Great Depression, although it will be some time yet before we know whether he and others have been successful. Without knowledge of the history of this calamity there would be a greater difficulty in planning to deal with our current problems.
Those of us who make anything, design things or work in business are building on the foundations that history have given us, anyone worth their salt, involved in any form of activity looks at what has been tried before, what has failed, what has succeeded and why, this is building on history.
Given all this it surprises me that the teaching of history is not regarded as important, it is to me as senseless as not teaching maths, because everyone has calculators or computers.
Neil Kinnock once said of Margeret Thatcher, “she knows the price of everything and the value of nothing “.
However Oscar Wilde said it before him.
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