History is not gossip.

"History repeats itself."

This famous saying is related to what George Santaya, a Spanish philosopher once said - "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

For me, it doesn't necessarily mean that everything that has happened in the past will be bound to happen again. I think it is called "deja vu", more commonly in a paranormal realm. It just suggests that maybe the same bad things can happen again if the present people don't recognize that it's the same pattern that's been happening... tragedy's bound to happen again, if the current state is misleading people of its past, thus, people tend to make a cloudy judgment for their future.

History always has two sides to the coin.

Many people argue that history is only written by the people who won and continued to live on. But I think, it is more than that. I am not a historian nor a history teacher, but I truly enjoyed my time studying history, especially in college. I realized that the history written in elementary and high school textbooks should NOT be just about the chronological order of dates, important people, and places involved in certain historical events. More than a lot of this information, the context and the reason why these people acted the way they acted, how did they decide on which step to be taken, etc. History is more than just the memorization of dates, it should be more about the comprehension of the ideas, and the synthesis of these ideas into realizations wherein the learner can apply good decision-making process when he/she is facing similar scenarios.

It's just so sad to know that in my country, history is being revised by certain people who are tasked to create confusion and angst against the proper channels of history. Historical revisionism is what they call it, the blatant romanticism of certain gore parts of history such that it is justified or worst is to glorify only the good, such that the bad things that happen seem to vanish and be thought of as a work of fiction.

No one can argue that technology and the internet are essential tools in knowledge acquisition, especially in the world today. You can get information at the click of your fingertips. However, the very same tool is also used by some people for deception and personal gain. At first, social networking sites (SNS) were mainly used for communication and connection among peers or people with the same interest, however, through time, it has evolved into a variety of different stuff all at the same time. Anyone can create an account just by having an email address. One person can have multiple email addresses that can be used to create multiple accounts. The reason why they need to create multiple accounts, I am not really sure, maybe they just forgot their password and whatnot... but some others are deliberately creating these dummy accounts to bash other people, create content that deceives people, and gain money from it.

My point is, that some people create their own story of fiction and present it to their "followers" as factual information. These followers don't recognize if the information is factual or not because they do not carefully screen where this information came from. This certain information is shared from one person to another, which multiplies the deception. These people don't recognize that they were deceived in the first place because all of their feeds say the same thing, an algorithm used by many SNS to encourage continuous usage and patronage of their SNS.

This information which was originally fiction evolves, until such time that the person who's reading it would not even dare to fact-check because it seems real. I wish to share with you the experience I had with one of my aunts. This aunt of mine shared a photo message with me through a messaging app. The photo is of a girl who looks sick and in a hospital bed, the caption was something like (non-verbatim) "This is Jenny. She has leukemia and is currently undergoing chemotherapy. Pass this message etc. etc." Remember the chain email which became a chain text, and not a chain message. I looked at the photo of the girl and wondered if she looks very familiar. Then, it dawned on me, that the photo was really Jenny, a sick girl with leukemia who happens to be a character of Song Hye Kyo in the Korean drama "Endless Love: Autumn in my Heart". So, I replied to my aunt and told her that it was not a real person, but only a K-drama character. I also reminded her to be careful with what we share online with our friends and even family and to not believe right away. Yes, this example is very shallow... however, but the same tactic is being done to who knows who.

Now, there are many fake accounts on video streaming platforms like YouTube, and other SNS like Facebook and Tiktok. These fake accounts create content that most of the time, has no basis, only opinions that to them are considered facts. They mock the real historians saying that this history is not real and that people should not believe the history written in books being taught in schools.

It's just so sad that a normal person would choose to believe these fake accounts rather than fact-check from more credible sources. They would argue that their version of the truth is the real truth and that the ones which are evidence-based, had been studied on for many years, based on artifacts, old legal documents, and personal encounters of witnesses are all lies.

They would rather think that history is like gossip. Whatever we know now is not real, or maybe it is, but there is another reality.

How have we become like this? As an educator, it's just so depressing to know that this is happening in the world right now. Thus, this poses a challenge for me to educate more people about digital citizenship, fact-checking, and being careful before clicking the like or share button... so as not let them get trapped in the idea that history is gossip.