Of course this is incredibly important, you cannot effectively prepare for the future if you are not watching the present. At the same time you cannot truly understand the present if you do not have a grasp on the past.
If you are like me, you probably didn’t really like history very much in school. Dry facts and regurgitation were not always my best subject in elementary school, and for whatever reason I could never determine just what dry facts to remember on test day which always just made it worse.
Over the years though I have come to enjoy history, and there are several great guides along the way. In his book “In But Not Of“, Hugh Hewitt outlined a very decent reading list to understand just how civilization progressed to the modern “West”. I highly recommend you pick up both a copy of his book as well as you read that reading list.
For those of you who have limited time however there is another option. For the past few years on every single Friday, Hugh Hewitt has had Dr. Larry Arnn of Hillsdale College (sometimes other Professors are guests as well) on as a guest speaker in what is known as the Hillsdale Dialogues. These are broadcast every week and are available for free as a podcast here, they can also be listened to on the web via sound cloud. These discussions make learning more enjoyable, they are done by some of the greatest intellectuals of our time, and of course they are free. Yes you get one of the best educations available and it is free.
Hillsdale in fact offers several courses available for free as well. While these free courses won’t earn you a diploma, they are a great way to get the education you may have missed out on by choice or simply our increasingly unraveling educational system.
