History Study - Why?

During childhood, do you question your teachers why do you need to learn social studies class? One of my history teacher taught things that's stuck with me until today. "You can not predict the future without studying history", "things that already happened will happen again". This is inline with Harvard Business School's book on Decision Making: realize the pattern of a problem, classify the problem with the problems that are already solved, then try to use the existing solution to the same type of problem.

In Thai history classes, i was taught to remember a number of important figures during Thai revolution in 1932. However, I was surprised to find out how their descendants could never reach the same level in Thai government again. Moreover, i was taught to remember the list of thai prime ministers. I wonder why their descendants could never reach any high-level government posts. The reason because Thais do remember what the person did. Since Thai culture evolved around treating others with respect. Thais do not speak out to these families to make them feel bad. But rather they held a silent rebel towards these families or what westerners may think of "passive aggressive" behavior.

There was a famous remark from King Bhumibol the great of Thailand that could be translated to "The nation's prosperity depends on the government to appoint the good man with power and never to appoint the bad man with power". So Thais never appoint the past dictators' families to office again.

Since i've written about the chieftain in the previous post, this chieftain never really studied history. He wasn't paying attention to his history teachers. Otherwise he wouldn't have behaved the way he did. His family will be added to the secret black list right after his bread shop sale. And all his the future generations will never come close to chieftain position.

Had he paid enough attention to his history teachers. He could have changed the destiny of his land, his people by much. He won the election unanimously. Had he not let his greed taken over his self control, he could have been a great leader. What a pity watching a man ruining his life. I don't think he knows that he's going to take all his future generations down with him.

History study turns out to be one of the most useful classes a child could have learned. Together with your most valuable resource, history can be used to improve both your decision making skill and your negotiation skill.