The following article appeared in The Huffington Post in June 2015.
Not long ago, I asked a 16-year-old cousin if she liked studying history in high school. “I don’t do history,” she replied with a shrug.
She’s not atypical. Many of our young people are ignorant of basic historical facts – as in, they don’t know who won the Civil War. And they don’t seem to care too much about that.
But I wonder: so what, if our kids know little about the past? Does history really matter anymore?
The answer isn’t so obvious.