The Past Was Never This Simple

We live in an age when the past is being rewritten every day — sometimes by new discoveries, sometimes by old ideologies. Political leaders invoke “golden ages.” Social media churns out myths dressed as facts. The less we understand history, the easier it becomes to manipulate us with half-truths about the present.

In school, I found history boring — a march of dates, kings, and battles that felt remote and meaningless. I couldn’t have imagined that, years later, it would become one of the most exciting subjects I read about regularly. What changed wasn’t history itself, but how I came to see it: not as something finished, but as something still being uncovered.

History is not a list of things that happened. It’s how we make sense of change — how we understand why societies rise and fall, why values shift, why progress is never a straight line. It teaches empathy, because it reminds us that people in other times faced dilemmas as real as ours. It teaches perspective, because it reveals how ideas we take for granted — democracy, equality, even childhood — are inventions, not inevitabilities.

Books like The Dawn of Everything, by anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow, make this case brilliantly. They show that human history is far less linear and far more experimental than the stories we tell ourselves. Archaeological evidence from places like the Middle Dnieper region of Eastern Europe reveals that some communities shifted between farming and foraging over generations — choosing to return to a more mobile life even after developing agriculture. Others, like the early settlement of Çatalhöyük in Anatolia, practiced agriculture without kings, priests, or palaces. Far from being passive victims of necessity, these societies made conscious choices about how they wanted to live.

And more recently, Naoise Mac Sweeney’s The West: A New History of an Old Idea brilliantly dismantles the myth that “the West” is a continuous, coherent civilizational story; it shows how identities were invented, repurposed, and politically mobilised over centuries.

Civilizations have risen and vanished; freedom and hierarchy have taken many forms. To read history this way is to realize that “the way things are” is not the way they must be.

And yet, in most schools, history is taught as if it were carved in stone. Students memorize timelines and “important facts,” but rarely encounter the discipline’s living questions: How do we know this? Whose account is missing? What might new evidence reveal? In classrooms, history is embalmed — stripped of debate, uncertainty, or discovery. We ask students to recite what happened, not to explore how we know it happened. We teach them that truth is fixed and singular, when in fact, the historian’s craft is about piecing together fragments, comparing perspectives, and holding contradictions.

It’s a tragedy of pedagogy: a subject that should teach humility and curiosity instead becomes an exercise in memorisation.

Ironically, even as school history remains static, the field itself is exploding with new insights. Historiography is being transformed by science and technology. Archaeologists using LIDAR have uncovered vast networks of ancient cities hidden beneath forests — from the Maya lowlands to the Amazon basin. Genetic evidence is rewriting our understanding of migration and ancestry, revealing how interconnected early human societies really were. Climate data and satellite imagery are letting us reconstruct vanished landscapes and forgotten trade routes.

The past is no longer distant — it’s alive, visible, and continuously reshaped by discovery. What was once “known” keeps changing, reminding us that knowledge itself is provisional. Imagine if history in schools captured even a fraction of that excitement: students analysing sources, debating interpretations, tracing how new findings challenge old narratives.

To teach history well is to teach inquiry. Not “Who were the heroes of 1857?” but “Why did different groups join the uprising for different reasons — and how do we piece those reasons together from the evidence they left behind?”

In the end, history’s gift is not nostalgia but perspective. It reminds us that we are temporary stewards in a long human story — inheritors of both wisdom and folly. To learn history deeply is to learn humility: the sense that we stand on shifting ground, trying to make sense of fragments left behind.

If schools could help students feel that — that history is not dead but unfinished — we might raise a generation less certain, but more thoughtful. And perhaps that’s exactly what the future needs.