Taking one or another course is always a challenge, a desire to improve your knowledge in a particular science. Before choosing you have to ponder over the advantages and disadvantages, how this course would help you in your future career and would really be significant for you. A student should have strong reasons to study each particular course, especially those ones, who are studying not for nothing, just for having the diploma, but for realizing personal dreams and life expectations. I believe I belong to the category of students, who are aiming for the best results from any course they choose, that is my goal, it is hard and almost impossible to take something valuable from any course without applied force. You have to be strictly directed to the final result, I mean not the grade, but the knowledge in your head.
In this reflection paper, I need to give my reasons of choosing a history course. I will share my thoughts on this topic with pleasure; studying history is meaningless without reflecting, discussing, and arguing. Everything comes from childhood; in this very period, parents give maybe simple, but absolutely brilliant advice, which will rule your life. What I definitely learnt from my father is the importance to know the history of your country, without it you cannot consider as a full-fledged citizen of your own motherland. He was right; moreover, I noticed that any discussion, which absolutely does not concern history, may change its course and people all the time start arguing about politics and history. It is a normal thing because everything in this world has its own history, the more you know – the better you are prepared to be on a topic of discussion with different groups of people. It makes you confident and it shows your all-round education. That is important not only to impress people but to make a successful career. I am also guided by George Santayana’s words “those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it”. It is universal truth, without knowing your past you will not have a future, because you would be going round and making the same mistakes, history has to teach us with every page in a book, with every word from your grandfather or from the veteran of some terrible war. Our generation has too much to learn, it is true, but at the same time we are lucky, because in our arsenal there is a power of historical background, which we must know. I also want to study the personality of great people, who changed the history of our world, no matter for what reasons they did their important steps. I like to ponder sometimes what would happen if there were no Hitler at all, or the Second World War would have been won by the German side.
If to think about how this course could help me in my future life, I would say that every President is well-educated in history, maybe some day I will live in The White House. That is a joke, but the truth is every great and famous man (writer, composer, musician or sportsman) knew the history of his country, moreover, a lot of them helped by their works to protect or to make a revolt. Many writers addressed to some historical issues of their times in the novels, without understanding your historical background you never understand huge number of books. Everything comes from history.
Many people believe that history is not relevant today; they are ruled by Elbert Hubbard’s words that “history is a well told gossip”. In my opinion, there are more gossips on the TV than in Walter Scott or Tolstoy’s books. “History is so many things: the material culture of the past; understanding lost communities; charting the rise and fall of civilizations. Yet history also provides us with a collective memory; it gives us a sense of connection to place, time and community. And that sensibility is being lost”. I must confess sometimes it is rather boring to study all those past events, but in every boring story, I can find something attractive and special to me. Sometimes I consider history as a fairy-tale, but a good written fairy-tale (especially about ancient times), but it is not a problem, nobody can impose his ideas on me, it is my own choice to believe or not, but the point is that first of all, you must read and learn and then say “I do not believe in it”; it is like about literature – only those can judge classic literature, who read it.