Making History

As all of these stories suggest, almost every aspect of our lives is designed. Even the English language is a design. This essay is my design, and you can read it because you understand the design involved in words and phrases and sentences, images and metaphors and similes, paragraphs and punctuation.

In my history classes, I teach students that “dead people rule our lives” because they designed the ideas and institutions and inventions that we simply take for granted. But I also tell students that they can make their own design choices; we can make history too, in the options of our everyday lives. As one student said recently, “We can become the dead people who rule other people’s lives.” To do this, we need to master the complexities of design.