A Thought Experiment
Close your eyes and imagine an alternative world where we learn history though novels like Slaughterhouse-Five written from the perspective of people who experienced the events instead of our traditional textbooks. Imagine a world that doesn’t consider a 5 on AP World History to be mastery of history, because it really isn’t, it’s just endless memorization of facts and events. Imagine learning about not only each country’s rhetoric during war, but also the life lasting effects of war on the civilians and soldiers whose worldviews are never the same again. If we learned history though its aftereffects, I believe we would learn so much more and our world could be a different place. There is something just so raw, unfiltered, and moving about people talking about their experiences. I’ve never been moved to tears reading the statistics about migrant camps but listening to just one of their stories had a profound impa...