Historical Education Quotes

When I was growing up, we learned our history almost as lives of the saints. And it came as a shock, "Oh, Jefferson had slaves?" It always comes as a shock to us that elevation to the White House didn't somehow cleanse them of all their deep character flaws.

A great nation does not hide its history. It faces its flaws and corrects them.

When I was a kid, both my mom and my dad worked night shifts, so we would spend a lot of time at my grandfather's house. He taught at UCLA and was just really into history. Before bed, when other kids heard fairy tales, he would tell us about the American founding fathers and the beginning of democracy.

Americans are in vital need of the instruction that historians can provide.

I grew up in the South, so a huge part of our American History education revolved around the Civil War.

It is so important that British children are taught about the World Wars that their great grandparents fought in and lived through. It was a terrifying time.

In the 1820s, the U.S., Japan, and the U.K. were some of the only countries where the average population received at least two years of formal schooling.

We tend to do period stuff because it helps make it one step removed from boring everyday reality.

Backward is just not a natural direction for Americans to look - historical ignorance remains a national characteristic.

When we were in school, we were told that Stalin was a madman who got control of Europe, which teaches you nothing.

We've got to know our history. We have to be able to bring our children to a place that they can be proud of.

Although I write to entertain, and try to keep my work free of didacticism, I do have a rather passionate belief in our need to be connected to - and to learn from - history.

I had access to books, and I could read... but that more foundational, basic historical awareness, I didn't have any of that.

When a scholar of the old culture vows no longer to have anything to do with men who believe in progress, he is right. For the old culture has its greatness and goodness behind it, and an historical education forces one to admit that it can never again be fresh.

My mom, for most of her life, was a Holocaust denier. And it was terrible for the entire family to have to deal with until, finally, a couple years ago, we had an intervention. And we had a rabbi come into the home, had him walk her through the history of the Jewish people, and then he made her watch "Schindler's List." And after that, my mom did a complete 180. Now she can't believe it only happened once.

Sure I do a lot of jokes about Anne Frank. But when you do those jokes, it makes people remember what happened to her. That process of bringing her story back doesn't have to be a serious one. What I say is all nonsense, but it helps to keep her memory alive.

At school, I never had a hold on English history, and cheder was a place run by sadistic incompetents, so I felt alienated from the Jewish part of my past.

The problem that we have is that most Americans don't even study American history, let alone Pinochet, Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin and all these guys.

She was old too, when she went to school they didn't have history.

It seems we're not only uninformed about our present, we're ignorant of our past.

Despite this lamentable lack of balance in our education I do not believe that either children or adults in my country are permeated by a widespread hostility to Germany.

My true love is history, but I didn't know how I could make a living at it.

What we still haven't done is really learned and embraced our history. When we do that, we'll no longer be doubtful and fearful that we are weak and incomplete.

Most of us get our history through story.

I definitely love history. I'm not formally trained or educated in history, but you could say I did go back to college in 2008 to do Untold History of the United States. That took five years. Co-author Peter Kuznick has been teaching history for something like 35 years, at American University and other places. His group of researchers brought me into contact with a lot of books.