Kathy Frensky, age 12, of Allentown, Pennsylvania, for her question:

What do we gain by studying past history?

Suppose you were born knowing everything, even how to solve every new problem without error. Naturally this is an impossible dream. As a babe you knew nothing at all. You learned things one by one and, no doubt about it, you learned most items from other people. Maybe some of them seemed silly or out of date and you figured out improvements. So you learned some sensible things from the past and you also learned not to make the mistakes that others had made.

Somewhere in this argument is one of the reasons why we gain by studying the past history of mankind. When mistakes were repeated again and again, we decided to avoid them. Another reward is a precious possession called self respect. And it is a known fact that this gift is ours only when we respect others and try to understand even the blunderers. The pages of history have lots of blunderers    and also many noble characters who reach man's highest ideals: When we respect the inheritance they left us, we also gain the comfortable quality of self respect.