Something I will always remember and some of the best advice I’ve ever been given is this….

Back in my high school days, I had this one teacher. He taught world history but more importantly, he taught me something much more valuable than that. He taught me, well, he taught us all actually, to do the research. It is known that history books are written not necessarily on fact but on the writer’s interpretation of the facts. Some would say that history books are written by the winners.

For that reason with each lesson in his curriculum, he did something that I greatly appreciated then and still do to this day. He would go to the library (Yes, a library, imagine that.) and find different sources of information from different authors. He would make photocopies of these writings and provide them to each of us so that we could have more than one source of information and thus, knowledge.

Even now, in today’s environment, I find myself thankful for him. While sadly he was dismissed at the end of a school year due to budget cuts, I have and always will remember the lesson. He didn’t want to give us basing our knowledge off only the regurgitated stuff that the school board had selected for us. He wanted more for us than that. He wanted us to form our own opinions based on what we read. I’m not by any means an expert in history despite finding it fascinating at times. I won’t even begin to profess that.

Expertise is not the subject at hand. Gathering information from all available sources is. Informed decisions, whatever they may be. With today’s technologies, we have a world of knowledge available to us and we don’t even need to look further than that little gadget we hold in our hands or the laptop that I’m writing this on. We do however need to consider the sources of these writings. Don’t simply swallow processed words. Read, listen, learn and then act accordingly.

“History is always written by the winners. When two cultures clash, the loser is obliterated, and the winner writes the history books-books which glorify their own cause and disparage the conquered foe. As Napoleon once said, ‘What is history, but a fable agreed upon?”

― Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code