What the Crusades Taught Me About Our Education System

I wasn’t expecting to spend an evening reading hundreds of comments about the Crusades, but here we are. What struck me wasn’t that people disagreed. History has always been debated. What surprised me was how confident everyone was that their version was the only correct one.

Some argued the Crusades were a necessary defense of Christianity. Others insisted they were nothing more than wars of conquest motivated by greed and power. Still others reduced two centuries of history to a single sentence or meme.

As I kept reading, I realized something.

We weren’t all arguing over the same history. We were arguing over the version of history we had each been taught.

For many of us, the Crusades occupied only a few pages in a high school history book. We memorized dates, names, and outcomes before moving on to the Renaissance. We didn’t spend weeks discussing the political alliances, economic incentives, religious motivations, or competing historical sources. Most of us received a broad overview, not a graduate seminar.

That isn’t necessarily a failure of our education system. There are only so many hours in a school year, and thousands of years of history to cover. But it does leave room for something else to happen later in life.

We fill in the gaps.

Sometimes we fill them with documentaries. Sometimes with books. Sometimes with church teachings. Sometimes with YouTube videos, podcasts, influencers, or social media personalities. Each source emphasizes different aspects of the same event, and before long, two people can be looking at the same historical period while telling completely different stories about what happened and why.

The Crusades are a perfect example.

Were they about religion? Yes.

Were they about politics? Yes.

Were they about wealth? Also yes.

Were they about land, trade routes, prestige, papal authority, military alliances, and regional power? Absolutely.

Trying to reduce nearly two hundred years of history into a single sentence is like trying to explain the entire twentieth century by saying, “It was about democracy.” It’s technically related, but it ignores almost everything that made the period so complicated.

What concerned me most wasn’t the disagreement. Healthy debate is part of learning. What concerned me was how often historical events were being used to justify present-day political beliefs.

History can inform today’s discussions, but it shouldn’t be treated as a collection of slogans that prove our side was always right.

When someone says, “The Crusades were objectively moral,” or another person insists, “The Muslim threat was only an excuse,” they’re usually expressing a modern worldview through the lens of history rather than examining history on its own terms.

That’s something we all do from time to time.

The challenge is recognizing it.

The best historians rarely speak in absolutes. They acknowledge multiple causes, conflicting sources, unintended consequences, and the reality that human beings are complicated. The further you study history, the less likely you are to explain it in a meme.

Ironically, the biggest lesson I took away from that comment section had very little to do with the Crusades themselves.

It reminded me that education doesn’t end when we graduate. We continue learning for the rest of our lives, and the quality of that education depends largely on whether we’re willing to question our own assumptions as much as we question everyone else’s.

Maybe that’s the real problem with social media.

It’s not that people disagree.

It’s that we’ve become conditioned to believe there is only one acceptable interpretation of history, when the best historical scholarship usually begins with the words, “It’s more complicated than that.”

The next time a historical event starts trending online, I hope more people resist the urge to ask, “Who was right?”

Instead, ask a better question:

“What am I missing?”