To change the future, we must reteach history to children

2022-10-25 19:17:32Pikëpamje SHKRUAR NGA YUVAL NOAH HARARI
To change the future, we must reteach history to children

We adults may not be able to 'unlearn' the harmful stories we've been told, but we can stop them from 'marching down the generations'.

We cannot protect children from history. In Ukraine, millions of families have lost their homes to Putin's war. In Delhi, record temperatures of 50 degrees Celsius kept children indoors this summer, unable to study or play. Global food prices are rising, causing children around the world to go hungry. So, of course, it is inevitable that the next generation will face the big questions: why are there wars? What is our place in nature? What is money and why is it so important?

Often, children take these questions much more seriously than adults. They question the things adults take for granted. Adults can get annoyed when a child answers "why?" for each of our answers. But usually, the child is simply trying to see things through in a way that adults have long since ceased to do.

Another thing we cannot protect children from is exposure to false historical narratives. From a very early age, young people are bombarded with myths and misinformation, not only about current events, but also about the basic history of humanity itself, who we are, where we come from, and how we got here.

In my native Israel, for example, even secular students usually learn about the Garden of Eden and see colorful images of Noah's Ark long before they hear about Neanderthals or see the cave art of Lascaux and Sulawesi. This has an impact. So would the historical narratives that children have to learn in school, from Putin's invasion of Ukraine to the global food crisis that followed.

If we abandon children to myths, unlearning these ideas later in life is a difficult, sometimes impossible task. It is vital that we talk to children openly about the big issues in a responsible, scientific, evidence-based way, rather than dogmatic belief. This is a challenge I faced recently when I was writing world history for children.

What I learned from this project is that addressing big issues for children is a delicate business. Some subjects are fun, like exploring the daily lives of Stone Age hunter-gatherers, when people lived in nature and children spent their days learning to climb trees, track animals, and make fire. But other topics are more challenging. Examining what happened when ancient Sapiens met Neanderthals, for example, prompts us to discuss what life might have been like for a child with a Sapiens mother and a Neanderthal father, bringing up topics such as racism, war, genocide, and extinction. .

It is essential to talk about the dark side of history, but how do we avoid fear in children while talking about the dark times?

A guiding principle is that we should wait to share clear descriptions of horrors until the listener is mature enough to handle them. Instead, when dealing with adversity and injustice, it's better to emphasize freedom: no matter how terrible things are, people can usually make a difference for the better. This is not wishful thinking, but the very essence of the story. After all, history is not the study of the past, or merely a list of wars, disasters, and dead kings who ruled thousands of years ago. History is the study of how things change.

If we think that the world has always been the same and that the way we live now is the only way for people to live, then it is natural to think that change is impossible and that the problems we face are insoluble. Even if things are very unfair, what can we do? That's the way the world is, we tell ourselves. But by studying history, we learn that people have not always lived like us and that the world is changing all the time. People made the world what it is, and people can change it. Of course, this is not an easy task, but it has been done many times before.

This is why the story is so powerful. It is the key to changing the world. So much so that, in many countries, governments fear history. Leaders rarely stop people from learning math or physics. But many governments prevent people, and especially young people, from learning at least some parts of history. It all goes back to those dead kings who ruled thousands of years ago, their icy hands reaching from beyond the grave to grasp our minds and freeze change.

After all, it was those long-dead kings who invented and spread various stories about gods, nations, money and love that many people today still believe and adhere to. To gain some freedom from these narratives and behave differently, we need to understand how they were created and spread in the first place. Otherwise, we will never see them for what they are: just stories. Children who ask "why?" are a powerful force that can shake these old tales to their foundations.

But, apart from avoiding terror, we must also be careful not to burden the youth with our responsibilities. The oldest sin we adults commit is expecting children to take over our projects, and in particular, to solve the problems we want solved but haven't figured out how. When we talk to children about big issues, we must, from time to time, ask ourselves why we are really doing this.

Every person in the world carries a heavy burden. When we teach history to young people, we sometimes do it to shift some of our burden onto the shoulders of the next generation. We want young people to continue to carry with them the beliefs, memories, identities and conflicts that have burdened us throughout our lives.

This is unfair. A far better reason to teach history is to help children free themselves of at least some of their fears and illusions.

I hope that history becomes a tool to free people and not bind them. A tool to create new agreements instead of perpetuating old conflicts. After all, the purpose of learning history is not to remember the past, but to free yourself from it.

*The Guardian / Yuval Noah Harari is a historian and author of "A Brief History of Humanity".

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