Question

You may say we should follow the advise of Tsao Chip (陶傑) and use the British system to teach history to our school children. The idea is simple: Try to arouse interest and focus on people rather than chronology.

In short, we should pay attention to his story rather than what happened in which year

But, we do not have to go that far for an example. Sima Qian (司馬遷), the great historian of our own country, used the same approach. Events were described according to the life and time of individual persons. Yes, there may be overlaps between records, but those are useful reinforcement for our memory, rather than unnecessary duplications.

(On that, many educationalists of my own medical school would not agree, and they try to eliminate every bits and pieces of repetition when they designed the curriculum. Jove, how often do we encounter a genius who could remember something after seeing it just once?)