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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   12712 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 12, 2025

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I don’t think most of them are valuable to most people

Not vastly in a purely economic sense, but personally I think the way I interact with information, ideas and the world generally is incomparably better off for having studied history at university, in a way I doubt I could have achieved by pure dilettantism. Maybe it isn't the most rational use of national resources, but either way I think it's still one of the developed world's greatest achievements that so many people get the opportunity to have their internal world enriched forever, even if a lot of them don't take it up when they're there.

better off for having studied history at university, in a way I doubt I could have achieved by pure dilettantism.

As someone who majored in engineering, I've come across a few largely-self-taught coworkers. Some of them are quite talented, but most seem to have more trouble than the degreed folks when we get into the deeper parts of the subject that aren't quite as fun to study (linear algebra, complex analysis, there is probably part of this in any field). I think there is real value to an engineering curriculum that makes us study the useful but un-fun parts that puts tools in the tool belt to solve real-world problems.

I've seen analogous outcomes from home-school students that were allowed to focus near-exclusively on their interests, and, even while otherwise bright, can't have a coherent conversation about some reasonably-part-of-the-curriculum topics -- for example, "the Spanish-American war and its consequences".

I mean sure, but I don’t think most people wou be materially hampered because they didn’t get exposed to philosophy or history or art history. There might be the odd tool (personally, I think formal logic is a very powerful tool for understanding the world, and the same is true of probability and statistics and so on) but unless such things are related to daily work in some way, it’s mostly a vestige of the leisure class view of college as finishing school and at that point, you can make a case for teaching manners and dance as part of making a person suitable to the upper class. But this, again is silly, and really doesn’t lead to gains for anyone. It’s a waste of time, and to be fair, most of this is something that could be done for nearly free using resources available cheaply online.

But it’s mostly about the grift. You have to pretend that you’re now a better person because you know some history of Asia, or read a bit of Kant, or wrote an essay on indigenous peoples.

While homeschooling had wide variances, I genuinely wonder how many public school educated kids could hold a coherent conversation about the Spanish American war.

Good question. But it's at least part of the formal curriculum for AP US History, so the answer is hopefully nonzero even if some have forgotten since.

There is some advantage to knowing what (shared) curriculum can be pointed to. Even here, we have a somewhat understood corpus of "things I can refer to and expect readers to understand", but there is always some context dependence.

I definitely remember being taught about the Spanish American war, but I think most of my classmates, if asked today, would say something like ‘well, Cuba attacked Maine, so we had to go to war’ on the high end of historical knowledge. There’s only so much class time to go around, especially when a full 70% of it has to be dedicated to the civil war/slavery and WWII/the Holocaust.

This pattern of spending 70%+ class-time on the national lore and the rest of random tid-bits of history nobody quite remembered anyway was also present when I went through K12 education in Turkey. Every single detail of Ataturk's life and 1918-1923 history of Turkey drilled again and again in increasing detail for us instead of course. I wonder if there is any national curriculum anywhere with an alternative history that avoids this trap. But then what would you teach? History sounds very difficult to grapple with kids without some sort of narrative.

Not doubting the reason for the pattern. But ‘why American kids don’t know about the Spanish-American war’ is because they get a day long lecture about it, once. In contrast American kids know about D-day, Pearl Harbor, the battle of the bulge, guadalcanal and midway, Auschwitz. Because each one of those gets as much class time as the Spanish American war in its entirely- in some cases considerably more.

I can imagine a high-IQ Trump inflected curriculum in which the civil war is mostly brushed over, but the Spanish American war and WWI get a starring role in addition to WWII because it’s about America’s rise on the world stage.

Sometimes I like to imagine what it would be like if universities were actually calibrated for that purpose.

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