Teaching history should be relevant to our life today: Writer-historian Yuval Noah Harari

NEW DELHI: History should be taught on the basis of how it connects to our lives today as remembering names and dates about something that happened ages ago is no longer relevant now, Israeli writer-historian Yuval Noah Harari said Saturday. He said that in the age of social media people don't need more information in history classes.

"What they need is to be taught the ability to tell the difference between reliable and unreliable information, this is the number one job of history teachers today. It's no longer about listing names and dates and battles." He said historical names and dates are available on Google in seconds, but most people don't see the connection to their lives. "If some king won a battle some thousand years ago, why should I be interested in it?" he said during a recorded session at the Times Lit Fest here.

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"The point about history is that history is not the past. History is the study of change, history should be relevant to how we live today, to the questions that concern us right now," the "Sapiens" author said. To send his point across, Harari gave the example of the urge to eat more sweets, despite knowing its ill-effects on the body. "If you study history, and not the history of some king who won a battle but history of humanity, you get the answer. We evolved hundreds of thousands of years ago in the Savannah, with little food and rarely any sweet things," he noted.

When people found sweet fruits like figs on a tree, they would eat as many as they could without thinking of returning the next day to have some more, because by then the fruits might not be there. "So we are programmed by history to eat as many sweets things as possible, and if you understand this it suddenly becomes clear that it's not a problem with me, it's just now we are living in a situation which is very different from the situation in which we developed. And this creates this conflict or tension. So this is how history is relevant to my life," the 46-year-old writer said.

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Harari also added that works of fiction such as novels and films help in education and conveying history. "Of course it can be done better, it can be done worse, but humans are storytelling animals. And the easiest way for us to understand something is through a story," he said. He added that a great number of people know about the Middle Ages in England only through the works of Shakespeare and not historians.

However, the author of "Unstoppable Us" said that the key to writing about history is that one stays loyal to the truth and evidence. "What ultimately makes the difference between history and mythology is the evidence. In mythology you can invent anything you want even if you don't have evidence that this is true. In history, you can imagine some of the details, but the basis should be evidence," he said.