You know that the Opium War happened at 1840 because there is a page in the textbook that says so. It won't be long before you forget. However, if you know why the Opium War happened in 1840 instead of 1940 or 1740, you will remember it firmly, even if you are suddenly asked after a long time, you can recall it with a little association. It's been six years since I graduated from high school, and now I can still recall more than half of what I learned in history class. In retrospect, the key is to understand the internal relations of historical events. History is an understanding of what happened in the past. Why did this happen instead of that? How did it happen? What's the impact of things? No historical time exists in isolation, but is interrelated and influenced by each other. Judging from the structure of cognition, there are many events hanging on the time axis. From an abstract point of view, rote learning is a form of scattered knowledge points, which does not conform to the way of understanding history. Learning history in this way is bound to fail. My heart is that the first thing to build is the knowledge structure instead of remembering what happened to someone in a certain year. It's all details, in other words-fur. When reading a book, I don't think about what I think of, but what caused it. What is the root cause? What is the fuse? What happened and developed after this incident? How did people at that time evaluate this matter? How do people evaluate it today? Extend the tentacles of a thing in your mind, establish contact with other points, and form a system. With the increase of series of knowledge points, it will be more and more smooth to use.

Further, why study history at school? Can knowing the year of the Opium War really help you find a good job? That's impossible. Personally, I think there are two very important gains from studying history. One is the learning method mentioned above, which is to establish the connection between specific knowledge points and organize your own understanding and cognition system. This method can be extended to many places of work and study. The second gain is to help establish your own worldview. Man cannot predict the future, but he can know the past. History has proved that human society is a spiral development process. In addition, there are striking similarities in history. So many things that have never happened before, if viewed from a historical perspective, can find their clear context. With this understanding, when we step into the society after graduation to be responsible for our own decisions, we can abstract some ideas from what happened in the past to understand what is happening now and predict what will happen. In this way, our chances of making mistakes are much smaller, and the corresponding chances of survival and development are much greater. So please don't underestimate the role of history, study hard, and of course, forget your own rote learning methods and work hard to read history together.