History 101 | Travel History 

Successful people learn from their mistakes. They don’t do the same thing over and over again and expect to get a different result. When they don’t get the results they want successful people learn a lesson, change their approach, and try something new. Learning from your mistakes is not easy, though. Observing mistakes and thinking them through requires resilience. You need to be comfortable with uncomfortable emotions, and most people are trained to avoid painful feelings. Instead of analyzing a decision they forget and understanding why it happened, most people avoid thinking about it and never learn.

“‘I have done that,’ says my memory. ‘I cannot have done that,’ says my pride, and remains inexorable. Eventually–memory yields.” -Friedrich Nietzsche

Unable to handle the pain that comes from accepting responsibility for an action they aren’t proud of, people blame others. Their environment, their enemy, society.

Assigning responsibility is hard. There are so many factors that contribute to every single moment. If you spill hot tea on a friend, it could be you running into them, them running into you, or maybe even a third person who said something right before is responsible. A simple movement like pouring tea on a friend is complex and contains partial responsibility for a number of people. Now, try to take a four year period of world war two and tell me who is responsible.

On a day to day level, it can be challenging to learn from our mistakes. It can be challenging to assign responsibility. That problem extends when you try and interpret and learn lessons from millions of individuals all over the world.

The complexity of history makes it hard to teach in any environment, but especially a school. Especially when the people running the school, the school district, and the department of education have a vested interest in making you see events in a certain way.

In school, we learn simple narratives about the past. Heroic allies and evil enemies clash, but we don’t even begin to understand the complexities of the people, of the preceding events, of the motivations of the individuals involved.

But these events are taught as if they are understood completely. We learn a narrative, and it becomes the foundation of our worldview. We base our ideas for the future on the lessons from the past. If X is what happened in the past, Y is what we must do in the future.

That is why there is no subject more propagandized than history.

“He who controls the past controls the present, and he who controls the present controls the future” – George Orwell

In school, you are taught about the evils of Nationalism and propaganda used by the Nazi’s or the Soviets, but without a hint of irony you are then taught to celebrate the military victories of your country (Nationalism), and your curriculum comes from government approved textbooks (Propaganda).

The school system is the last place you want to go to learn about history, but for a lot of people, it’s the only history they ever get.

In 2008 when the housing bubble burst and the government wanted to run massive deficits and create more money, the public was happy to accept it because of the narrative they learned about the Great Depression. The narrative that the economy improved because of government regulation and wasteful spending, even though the opposite is true.

People believe that wars were won through violent triumphs, so they demand violence be met with violence and that only further escalates conflicts. They never learn about the attacks that never turn into war because of acceptance and diplomacy.

We leave high school with an overly simplistic and flawed view of history.

Going to university, it doesn’t get much better. Most students don’t even take a history class. They usually are hard classes requiring lots of reading and writing papers. They are options students avoid because they aren’t GPA boosters. Like almost every topic in university, they take something that has the potential to be interesting and turn it into something structured, rigid, and boring.

Skipping college to travel takes you to places where events happened and allows you to relate to them in a way you never could in a classroom. As you travel, you encounter the history of almost every place you go. You can see and hear about the things never mentioned in your history and social studies classes. You hear fewer stories about great leaders and more what things were like for the average person. Most importantly you hear about events from a different perspective. It is also biased, sometimes grossly so, but seeing the same event from a different perspective is the best way of understanding.

Seeing communist propaganda in Vietnam helps you see your education in a different way, maybe it wasn’t as neutral as you thought it was, maybe there is a motive behind the lessons you were learning in school.

When you learn about history in a textbook, it is usually a story about good guys and bad guys. Moralizing groups of people to say that the Germans were evil and the Allies were good. Or the Communists were evil, and the West was good. It is heavy on judgment and light on reason.

Traveling and interacting with people from other countries allows you to see that people aren’t defined by national identities. The actions of the people in X government have almost nothing to do with the people in X country. People don’t bear responsibility for crimes committed by people they don’t know and never met.

All around the world people have much more in common than they do separating them. History teaches us about national collectives, but travel shows you that it’s all about people. That putting labels on groups of people as good guys and bad guys doesn’t get you any closer to understanding history. Hearing about the situations people were put in and relating the experience of individuals helps you understand.

Finally, traveling gives you a relationship with many places around the world. When you return home, you still have a bond with those locations. It isn’t some name on a map, but a real place that you’ve been. When you see stories on the news about riots in Athens, and you see a restaurant that you ate at in the background of the news footage, the events seem more important, and you are naturally more curious. When a documentary comes on about the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and you have seen the killing fields, you are more likely to sit and watch and learn.

Through history, we have a lens to see where the world is going and through travel, more than any academic lectures, you will have a platform and motivation to better understand history.