Yes, is the simple answer to that, though it’s an idea that is frowned on by academics these days. History should be studied for its own sake, so they say, not for any moral lessons it might have. But the fact is that human nature doesn’t change, and people always seem to make the same stupid mistakes when confronted with similar problems. Those who are ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it, as the old saying goes, but I would go further, and say that history itself tells us that even those who are fully aware of history are also doomed to repeat it.
So, what does history teach us? Probably that there’s nothing we can do, so we should just sit back and enjoy the ride. Don’t let it get you down, in other words.
History begins with an observer of an event which is embedded in a text. It is always the product of an individual psychology and read through one’s own psychology. There is no view from nowhere. So, all recorded history is reliable within limits and you the reader, decide what the limits are. If you read history through a prism of morality, there are moral lessons to be learned.
That’s true, but there are ways of deciding if something is more reliable, or less. If there are multiple sources, for example. Contemporary epigraphic evidence, such as inscriptions, are also very useful.
With regard to the particular project I mentioned, researching the school houses, it was because the school seemed to just basically ignore its own history.
The school had been formed by a merger of two schools, a girls and a boys school, that had taken place some years before I was at it, and although both of those schools had long histories, these were apparently just forgotten about. As part of my A level history course I took on the job of researching those histories, which involved, for example, checking out the various trophies awarded on sports day, which had all been hidden away in a cupboard, gathering dust. Each one had a small metal plaque, embossed in Braille with the name of the winning house, added to its base each year, and from this I was able to compile a list of all the house winners on sports day.
Do you think the traditions of the girls and boys schools were forgotten because they were suppressed? If so, why? In the city where I live there are two state universities, one an historically Black university. When I first moved here, I thought why don’t they just merge the two schools? But, had they done that, the cultural history of the Black and White universities would be “forgotten”.
If that’s what your school was doing, what do they want to forget?
I think suppressed is probably too strong a word. They just didn’t seem to care. When I was there, the girls’ and boys’ campuses were still separate, and it was only the lessons themselves that were merged, so there was no reason at all not to continue to embrace those older histories. I believe things have changed quite a lot since then, though.