Teaching the Importance of the Present Through Time Travel

As a high school history teacher, sometimes I feel like my number-one enemy in life is antipathy toward the past. After all, my job is to show students how they can explore, interpret, and utilize the past in order to understand our world. If teenagers don’t believe they have any reason to care about history, (and they often don’t), I can’t get very far in my teaching.

However, I found a meme that highlights how our popular culture and popular conceptions actually do place a lot of importance on the past, while, simultaneously, we don’t give ourselves the same respect in the present.

Here’s the meme:

When people think about traveling to the past, they worry about accidentally changing the present, but no one in the present really thinks they can radically change the future.

The idea this statement references is the “butterfly effect” or the “hinge factor” — the idea that one small change in the past can have enormous ramifications: The path of a tornado could be changed by the flap of a butterfly’s wings, or the outcome of a world-changing event could swing on a single hinge. Many historians love to ask counterfactual “what if” questions like this, dependent on a single change in the past. One popular example is Robert E. Lee’s “lost order,” which may have saved the Union from defeat at the Battle of Antietam in 1862, thus changing the entire course of the Civil War, U.S. history, and the world as we know it.

I think people usually grasp this concept pretty intuitively: Each of us can imagine, for example, that it may have been a single chance occurrence or two that led our parents to meet or begin a romance, and if it weren’t for that we wouldn’t exist. Back to the Future is probably the best reference for most Americans: Marty McFly has to make sure his parents fall in love when he time-travels back to their high school days or he’s a goner.

When it comes to the present, however, we generally don’t give ourselves the same credit we give to people in the past. As the meme states, “no one in the present really thinks they can radically change the future.” Just imagine for a moment: What future possibilities might you enable with the smallest of decisions you make in your life? You never know if the actions you take in the present can “alter the timeline” and change history entirely.

I think it’s a good idea to engage with students’ conceptions of the past, present, and future using these discussions. We should remind them throughout any history class how important the smallest events can be, and how important their own decisions are in the present.