Why Should We Be Interested in History?

One day I asked my niece what she was studying in school. She replied the pyramids in Egypt, but she wasn’t interested in learning about them.

I almost had a heart attack.

Okay, I might have overreacted, because what she really was saying was that she had no interest in Egyptian history (not just history) and quite frankly I have no desire to study Egyptian history in depth. But her statement and my reaction did give me reason to wonder what do we tell children when they say they have no interest in history? It is after all full of dead people and events that happened a long time ago.

I started by telling my niece that we study Egyptian history because that is the start of our common history.
Then I realized I had to make it meaningful to her. She likes walruses and wants to be a marine biologist. So I said to her, “Being a scientist means more than sitting on the ice floes with the walruses. You might have to do some fund raising to keep your research going. And some issues that affect walruses, like global warming, affect other things as well. Things like the pyramids in Egypt.”

I continued my lecture, “One day you might have to appear before the President of Egypt or some other Egyptian government group to ask for some money to fund some research on pollution’s effects on walruses. Now are you more likely to get the money by just talking about walruses or by connecting pollution effects on walruses and the destruction of the pyramids by pollution?”

Maybe she took away from this talk that history can be a means of communicating across barriers, that it’s a bridge that connects us all.