Why Is It…
Why is it that in spite of Darwin, in spite of the common cellular origin of all life on our planet, we go on thinking of "history" as that of man’s brief time on the earth, a mere 10,000 years or so? Why hasn’t "history" become the history of life on the earth and taken its rightful place in our schools? Are we better off, more civilized, more capable of furthering our civilization if we can recount the battles, say, of the American Civil War, and know nothing about, the Miocene period when large numbers of apes, including probably our own blood relatives, roamed the plains of eastern Europe and the near East? Who is more apt to respect human life, the one who can recount what happened at Shiloh, Tennessee, during the first week of April, 1862, or the one who knows that during the Miocene Epoch, roughly 15 million years ago, as many as 100 species of apes roamed throughout the Old World, including not unlikely human ancestors such as Dryopithecus in Europe and Sivapithecus in Asia?
Furthermore we’re told (A Lesson About History’s Lessons) that kids now a days are not even learning man’s recent history in the schools. "Each of us who teaches history has been reminded repeatedly in recent years about the "historical illiteracy" of our nation’s youth. The Bradley Commission, Diane Ravitch, the evening news, even chance acquaintances tell us that the ‘typical’ American teenager cannot place the Civil War in the correct decade (or perhaps even the correct half century). That same generic seventeen-year-old, we are told, does not know the purpose of Jim Crow legislation, nor recognize the contribution of the Supreme Court’s Brown decision in ending that chapter in our history. He or she does not know that England colonized North America’s Atlantic coast, and is unaware that Spain’s imperial arm extended into the American Southwest."
These comments, of which there are no end, never include mention of the much greater "hole" in kids’ knowledge of the history of life on earth. Of that much earlier history, which most certainly tells us much more about ourselves than, say, the Battle of Shiloh, by in large nothing is known by our school children, with only one exception, the Jurassic and Cretaceous Periods when the dinosaurs, then terrible lizards, but now children’s playthings, ruled. So instead of teaching our children the history of life, the life that we share with all living creatures, we teach a few favored periods of history, for young children times of the dinosaurs, for older children, perhaps, the time of the Greeks and the Romans, a bit of the so-called Middle Ages, and then in great detail the modern period, primarily one of battles and wars, of men killing one another and in most instances for no good reason. Wouldn’t our children be better served to learn the history of plate tectonics, and the creation of mountains as plates crashed together, the rise of homo sapiens and how we came to be human?
It was George Santayana http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Santayana philosopher, essayist, poet, novelist, and lifelong Spanish citizen, who said that, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Now this statement is often used by history teachers, and even more often perhaps by politicians, to stress the importance of the knowledge of history. But here also they are only talking about man’s most recent history, again that of one or two thousand years. Furthermore whereas knowledge of Neville Chamberlain’s "appeasement" policy ought to have prevented the subsequent Yalta give-away of Eastern Europe, it didn’t. Nor did knowledge of the Vietnamese War prevent our current war in Iraq from taking place. So that one might just as well say that those who remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
But if by "past" we mean the history of past life on the earth the statement is nonsense. Whether we "remember" it or not that life will not be repeated. The dinosaurs are gone forever, as is Pangaea, as is the wooly mammoth. Rather to remember this past is to realize how precious life is. And that’s why this past ought to be taught in the schools. Too often remembering our most recent past, which has been one of wars and the slaughter of millions, seems to make us perpetrators of more of the same. Witness the predominance in our lives of Al Qaeda and Al Qaeda-like groups, and the ascendancy of the military industrial complexes within our most developed nations. Knowledge of our recent, tragic past has done nothing to prevent this from coming about, whereas knowledge and understanding of life’s history might have.
