How does learning about the past can help us to build a better future?

By: Luis M. Ballestas A


In an ever changing world, it is easy to forget what used to be the rule in the past, and looking backwards is sometimes considered as a fear of new things, but seeing what others have done and the outcome of those actions can help us to prevent ourselves from committing their mistakes. I think putting things in perspective and analyzing the past is the answer to achieve a better future for our children.

In a globalized world, the decisions made by others can affect us in a more direct way than it used to be in the past and it is important to take a look to the choices taken by others and avoid negative results in order to be more responsible with our community.

With just a superficial review of our history, we may notice how cyclic or iterative it is, but this does not have to keep this way; we have our destiny in our own hands and studying our past can really help us build a different and better future. The knowledge about which were the right and wrong judgments of others will help us to choose the best option for ourselves.

A new wave of innovators and people who refer themselves as vanguards, have stated that people should take historical information just as general culture. Furthermore, many have claimed that our current context is extremely different from the situations lived in the past. These allegations ignore completely the fact that the information we keep can only make sense when we use it as a base to make more conscious ant thoughtful decisions. Moreover, our history teaches us that most of the issues occurred in a particular period of history, share many similarities with several other important events that took place in a very different location, culture and time.

As we have seen, thinking about the past as a simple form of general culture can lead us to forget how important it is to relay our actions and decisions on the experience of others. In addition, it is because of all this knowledge, acquired during our constant evolution, that we must be more responsible of our decisions today than we were in the past. Only with the help provided by the knowledge we will build a better future for our civilization.