Saving My Revised GRE Issue 《拯救我的新GRE Issue》(Manuscript under Review)
© Copy Right 2012 by James Jiang. All Rights Reserved
Authorized and printed at Toronto, Canada, June 2012
Supplementary Ref
012
为何学习历史
Why Study History
Excerpt from Why Study History? By Peter N. Stearns, a professor at George Mason University.
History should be studied because it is
essential to individuals and to society, and
because it harbors beauty. There are many
ways to discuss the real functions of the
subject—as there are many different historical
talents and many different paths to historical
meaning. All definitions of history's utility,
however, rely on two fundamental facts.
【历史有助理解人和社会】History helps us
understand people and societies. History
offers a storehouse of information about how
people and societies behave. Understanding
the operations of people and societies is
difficult, though a number of disciplines make
the attempt. An exclusive reliance on current
data would needlessly handicap our efforts.
How can we evaluate war if the nation is at
peace—unless we use historical materials?
How can we understand genius, the influence
of technological innovation, or the role that
beliefs play in shaping family life, if we don't
use what we know about experiences in the
past? Some social scientists attempt to
formulate laws or theories about human
behavior. But even these recourses depend
on historical information, except for in limited,
often artificial cases in which experiments can
be devised to determine how people act.
Major aspects of a society's operation, like
mass elections, missionary activities, or
military alliances, cannot be set up as precise
experiments. Consequently, history must
serve, however imperfectly, as our laboratory,
and data from the past must serve as our most
vital evidence in the unavoidable quest to
figure out why our complex species behaves
as it does in societal settings. This,
fundamentally, is why we cannot stay away
from history: it offers the only extensive
evidential base for the contemplation and
analysis of how societies function, and people
need to have some sense of how societies
function simply to run their own lives.
【历史解释社会演变】 History helps us
understand change and how the society we
live in came to be. History is inescapable as a
subject of serious study follows closely on the
first. The past causes the present, and so the
future. Any time we try to know why something
happened—whether a shift in political party
dominance in the American Congress, a major
change in the teenage suicide rate, or a war in
the Balkans or the Middle East—we have to
look for factors that took shape earlier.
Sometimes fairly recent history will suffice to
explain a major development, but often we
need to look further back to identify the causes
of change. Only through studying history can
we grasp how things change; only through
history can we begin to comprehend the
factors that cause change; and only through
history can we understand what elements of
an institution or a society persist despite
change.
The importance of history in explaining and
understanding change in human behavior is
no mere abstraction. Take an important
human phenomenon such as alcoholism.
Through biological experiments scientists
have identified specific genes that seem to
cause a proclivity toward alcohol addiction in
some individuals. This is a notable advance.
But alcoholism, as a social reality, has a
history: rates of alcoholism have risen and
fallen, and they have varied from one group to
the next. Attitudes and policies about
alcoholism have also changed and varied.
History is indispensable to understanding why
such changes occur. And in many ways
historical analysis is a more challenging kind
of exploration than genetic experimentation.
Historians have in fact greatly contributed in
recent decades to our understanding of trends
Saving My Revised GRE Issue 《拯救我的新GRE Issue》(Manuscript under Review)
© Copy Right 2012 by James Jiang. All Rights Reserved
Authorized and printed at Toronto, Canada, June 2012
(or patterns of change) in alcoholism and to
our grasp of the dimensions of addiction as an
evolving social problem.
One of the leading concerns of contemporary
American politics is low voter turnout, even for
major elections. A historical analysis of
changes in voter turnout can help us begin to
understand the problem we face today. What
were turnouts in the past? When did the
decline set in? Once we determine when the
trend began, we can try to identify which of the
factors present at the time combined to set the
trend in motion. Do the same factors sustain
the trend still, or are there new ingredients that
have contributed to it in more recent decades?
A purely contemporary analysis may shed
some light on the problem, but a historical
assessment is clearly fundamental—and
essential for anyone concerned about
American political health today.
History, then, provides the only extensive
materials available to study the human
condition. It also focuses attention on the
complex processes of social change, including
the factors that are causing change around us
today. Here, at base, are the two related
reasons many people become enthralled with
the examination of the past and why our
society requires and encourages the study of
history as a major subject in the schools.
【 历 史 有 助 于 日 常 生 活 】 These two
fundamental reasons for studying history
underlie more specific and quite diverse uses
of history in our own lives. History well told is
beautiful. Many of the historians who most
appeal to the general reading public know the
importance of dramatic and skillful writing—as
well as of accuracy. Biography and military
history appeal in part because of the tales they
contain. History as art and entertainment
serves a real purpose, on aesthetic grounds
but also on the level of human understanding.
Stories well done are stories that reveal how
people and societies have actually functioned,
and they prompt thoughts about the human
experience in other times and places. The
same aesthetic and humanistic goals inspire
people to immerse themselves in efforts to
reconstruct quite remote pasts, far removed
from immediate, present-day utility. Exploring
what historians sometimes call the "pastness
of the past"—the ways people in distant ages
constructed their lives—involves a sense of
beauty and excitement, and ultimately another
perspective on human life and society.
【历史培育道德素养】History also provides a
terrain for moral contemplation. Studying the
stories of individuals and situations in the past
allows a student of history to test his or her
own moral sense, to hone it against some of
the real complexities individuals have faced in
difficult settings. People who have weathered
adversity not just in some work of fiction, but in
real, historical circumstances can provide
inspiration. "History teaching by example" is
one phrase that describes this use of a study
of the past—a study not only of certifiable
heroes, the great men and women of history
who successfully worked through moral
dilemmas, but also of more ordinary people
who provide lessons in courage, diligence, or
constructive protest.
【历史促进身份认同】History also helps
provide identity, and this is unquestionably
one of the reasons all modern nations
encourage its teaching in some form.
Historical data include evidence about how
families, groups, institutions and whole
countries were formed and about how they
have evolved while retaining cohesion. For
many Americans, studying the history of one's
own family is the most obvious use of history,
for it provides facts about genealogy and (at a
slightly more complex level) a basis for
understanding how the family has interacted
with larger historical change. Family identity is
established and confirmed. Many institutions,
businesses, communities, and social units,
such as ethnic groups in the United States,
use history for similar identity purposes.
Merely defining the group in the present pales
against the possibility of forming an identity
based on a rich past. And of course nations
use identity history as well—and sometimes
abuse it. Histories that tell the national story,
emphasizing distinctive features of the
national experience, are meant to drive home
an understanding of national values and a
commitment to national loyalty.
【历史培育合格公民】A study of history is
essential for good citizenship. This is the most
common justification for the place of history in
school curricula. Sometimes advocates of
citizenship history hope merely to promote
national identity and loyalty through a history
spiced by vivid stories and lessons in
individual success and morality. But the
Saving My Revised GRE Issue 《拯救我的新GRE Issue》(Manuscript under Review)
© Copy Right 2012 by James Jiang. All Rights Reserved
Authorized and printed at Toronto, Canada, June 2012
importance of history for citizenship goes
beyond this narrow goal and can even
challenge it at some points.
History that lays the foundation for genuine
citizenship returns, in one sense, to the
essential uses of the study of the past. History
provides data about the emergence of national
institutions, problems, and values—it's the
only significant storehouse of such data
available. It offers evidence also about how
nations have interacted with other societies,
providing international and comparative
perspectives essential for responsible
citizenship. Further, studying history helps us
understand how recent, current, and
prospective changes that affect the lives of
citizens are emerging or may emerge and
what causes are involved. More important,
studying history encourages habits of mind
that are vital for responsible public behavior,
whether as a national or community leader, an
informed voter, a petitioner, or a simple
observer.
What does a well-trained student of history,
schooled to work on past materials and on
case studies in social change, learn how to do?
The list is manageable, but it contains several
overlapping categories.
【学习历史有助于评定证据】The study of
history builds experience in dealing with and
assessing various kinds of evidence—the
sorts of evidence historians use in shaping the
most accurate pictures of the past that they
can. Learning how to interpret the statements
of past political leaders—one kind of
evidence—helps form the capacity to
distinguish between the objective and the
self-serving among statements made by
present-day political leaders. Learning how to
combine different kinds of evidence—public
statements, private records, numerical data,
visual materials—develops the ability to make
coherent arguments based on a variety of data.
This skill can also be applied to information
encountered in everyday life.
【学习历史锻炼解决争议能力】 Learning
history means gaining some skill in sorting
through diverse, often conflicting
interpretations. Understanding how societies
work—the central goal of historical study—is
inherently imprecise, and the same certainly
holds true for understanding what is going on
in the present day. Learning how to identify
and evaluate conflicting interpretations is an
essential citizenship skill for which history, as
an often-contested laboratory of human
experience, provides training. This is one area
in which the full benefits of historical study
sometimes clash with the narrower uses of the
past to construct identity. Experience in
examining past situations provides a
constructively critical sense that can be
applied to partisan claims about the glories of
national or group identity. The study of history
in no sense undermines loyalty or commitment,
but it does teach the need for assessing
arguments, and it provides opportunities to
engage in debate and achieve perspective.
【学习历史帮助评价世事变迁】Experience in
assessing past examples of change is vital to
understanding change in society today—it's
an essential skill in what we are regularly told
is our "ever-changing world." Analysis of
change means developing some capacity for
determining the magnitude and significance of
change, for some changes are more
fundamental than others. Comparing particular
changes to relevant examples from the past
helps students of history develop this capacity.
The ability to identify the continuities that
always accompany even the most dramatic
changes also comes from studying history, as
does the skill to determine probable causes of
change. Learning history helps one figure out,
for example, if one main factor—such as a
technological innovation or some deliberate
new policy—accounts for a change or whether,
as is more commonly the case, a number of
factors combine to generate the actual change
that occurs.
【学习历史有助于职业发展】History is useful
for work. Its study helps create good
businesspeople, professionals, and political
leaders. The number of explicit professional
jobs for historians is considerable, but most
people who study history do not become
professional historians. Professional
historians teach at various levels, work in
museums and media centers, do historical
research for businesses or public agencies, or
participate in the growing number of historical
consultancies. These categories are
important—indeed vital—to keep the basic
enterprise of history going, but most people
who study history use their training for broader
professional purposes. Students of history find
their experience directly relevant to jobs in a
Saving My Revised GRE Issue 《拯救我的新GRE Issue》(Manuscript under Review)
© Copy Right 2012 by James Jiang. All Rights Reserved
Authorized and printed at Toronto, Canada, June 2012
variety of careers as well as to further study in
fields like law and public administration.
Employers often deliberately seek students
with the kinds of capacities historical study
promotes. The reasons are not hard to identify:
students of history acquire, by studying
different phases of the past and different
societies in the past, a broad perspective that
gives them the range and flexibility required in
many work situations. They develop research
skills, the ability to find and evaluate sources
of information, and the means to identify and
evaluate diverse interpretations. Work in
history also improves basic writing and
speaking skills and is directly relevant to many
of the analytical requirements in the public and
private sectors, where the capacity to identify,
assess, and explain trends is essential.
Historical study is unquestionably an asset for
a variety of work and professional situations,
even though it does not, for most students,
lead as directly to a particular job slot, as do
some technical fields. But history particularly
prepares students for the long haul in their
careers, its qualities helping adaptation and
advancement beyond entry-level employment.
There is no denying that in our society many
people who are drawn to historical study worry
about relevance. In our changing economy,
there is concern about job futures in most
fields. Historical training is not, however, an
indulgence; it applies directly to many careers
and can clearly help us in our working lives.
Historical study, in sum, is crucial to the
promotion of that elusive creature, the
well-informed citizen. It provides basic factual
information about the background of our
political institutions and about the values and
problems that affect our social well-being. It
also contributes to our capacity to use
evidence, assess interpretations, and analyze
change and continuities. No one can ever
quite deal with the present as the historian
deals with the past—we lack the perspective
for this feat; but we can move in this direction
by applying historical habits of mind, and we
will function as better citizens in the process.
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