History is story telling. For hundreds of years, people around the world have told their history sitting around fires or their dinner tables telling stories of their family history or of their communities. In Native American or Indigenous communities, story telling was and is a way of telling children what’s right and wrong, and the legacy of family and ancestors. The same is true around the world in Africa, Asia, Latin and South America, the Middle East, Europe and the United States.

I am grounded in history, having been a History major at the University of Wisconsin with some of the best teachers of American, European, Asian, Latin and South American and African history I’ve ever experienced. I taught high school history and social studies in Racine, Wisconsin and Minneapolis, Minnesota.

As Day Sports Columnist Mike DiMauro says, we truly have to start asking ourselves are we teaching the history we need to teach?

History is not just a series of facts as told in textbooks. For years, Merle Curti’s textbooks on American History were considered the gospel texts on high school American History. Curti’s texts, however, are not terribly inclusive of many who helped to make America, including Native Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans and African Americans, among others. Nor do many texts used in schools tell history from a diverse viewpoint.

History must teach students about significant stories of each part of the world from different points of view. What were the origins of Homo sapiens in Africa? What was it like to be a young person in China or India, in Japan or Australia, in different parts of the United States or South America? How do the stories of Mexico and Canada differ? What were the human stories behind the Holocaust in Europe, and genocide in Russia and China during World War II and in Armenia between 1914 and 1922?

As a part of history, it is important to see history through the eyes of great storyteller/historians, such as Toni Morrison, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Vine Deloria, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Erika Lee. Chinua Achebe’s widely acclaimed novel “Things Fall Apart” is a heart-wrenching description of his struggling to live as a traditional Nigerian having been educated in England. To preserve that “twoness” he kept one room as his “England” room to which no one but him was admitted.

Karen, my wife and a former high school English teacher, tells an amazing story from 1972 of a young man in her African Literature class in Minneapolis’ West High School. He told her that a story in their book “Black African Voices” was the same as a story his grandmother had told him in Mississippi. Oral traditions are powerful and endure.

Young people need to learn about the Trail of Tears and the Indian Removal Act, why it happened and its impact on people’s lives to this day. What did Ulysses S. Grant do to try to preserve the progress of Reconstruction in America? Why were more than 3,000 people lynched in America?

The importance of teaching history is that by teaching how people see themselves, we get a better understanding of ourselves.

This cannot be done with a Black History Month alone. Likewise, a Hispanic History week or month does not cover what needs to be built into the sagas of America, Europe, Latin and South America. These stories must be woven into the overall curriculum over years of instruction.

How many students understand why people from Mexico were recruited into the agricultural fields of California or what it was like for Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor to reach the Supreme Court?

How many know what it was like to be an American citizen interned in a prison camp during the entire Second World War because you are Japanese?

Why did Ira Hayes, a Gila River Pima Native American, one of the heroic Marines who was among those who did the iconic flag raising on Iwo Jima in World War II, become an alcoholic and die from cold exposure?

A great way to engender student interest in history is well modeled by Foxfire, a student journal from the mountains of Northeast Georgia. Students were asked to go out and learn the history of their families and to write about them. Over time they’ve collected and researched more than 12 volumes of folklore, history and stories of life in their communities.

Getting students engaged in the rich history of our region would be a great way to capture their interest in history.

Nick Fischer is a former superintendent of New London schools and still lives in the city.

Editor's note: This commentary was updated to correct errors in the submission.