If you ask a room of elementary students if they like history, probably about half will raise their hands. It's about the same for middle schoolers. But once you hit high school, very few students enjoy learning about history. They say it's not as interesting as English, or as useful as science, or as challenging as math, and therefore that it's useless.

The problem behind history in schools is that most history teachers are boring. They know their subject back and forth, because there's rarely new information and the dates are pretty set in stone. They teach as if the information is more important than the thirst for knowledge, and that's where our schools are failing. History is not obsolete. Just because something already happened already, there isn't even a chance that its effects have faded or been somehow diminished over the course of time.

Nations are what they are because of who its people were in the past. Wars have been started over old grudges, religions have swerved from their tradition, and new countries have been created all based off of history. Does that sound like sub-par subject matter to you?

As an educational system, we have to stop making history seem less important than S.T.E.M. subjects (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math). While everyone wants their country to be the best, the brightest, and to produce the next generation of geniuses, it's time to consider that science might not be the only way to do that. We need students to understand what the consequences of their actions will mean for the future, and the simplest way to do that is by studying how that has occurred in the past.