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parrhesia  1yr ago (parrhesia.substack.com)   2982 thread views

History Classes Are Mostly Useless

parrhesia.substack.com

SS: Americans are rather ignorant about history. Moral reasoning by historical analogy is bad. Historical examples can be misleading for making predictions. These facts suggest that the utility of history courses is overestimated. In fact, they are mostly useless.

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Agreed with premise. History classes today are half trivia and half moral lessons. The trivia is meaningless, and the lessons are faulty. WW1 and American Revolution lessons are entirely trivia, with no influence on your appreciation for reality or ability to live a meaningful life. Lessons on women earning the right to vote become faulty morality: men for most of history were simply evil and putting women down, pay no attention to the impossibility of female enfranchisement without modern technology and a safe modern state.

I’m trying to think if there’s anything of value to be gained from history, and indeed there is: art history, the history of philosophy, and music history will present you with beautiful things that can genuinely inspire you and make your life better. Everything? The battles, the dates, the elections? No value. We’re not raising military generals, we are raising median adults. “War bad” is not a legitimate moral lesson.

art history, the history of philosophy, and music history will present you with beautiful things that can genuinely inspire you and make your life better.

You're making the same mistake here. People who genuinely think "history useless" will have no use for art, music or philosophy history either. "What do I care who painted some dumb picture three hundred years ago? Yawn Rap is better than Mozart" and so on. We've had those very discussions on here before; 'schools should only teach STEM because those are real things that are useful when you get a job being creative and contributing to growing the economy, all that English and music crap can be faked up in ten minutes for an essay because there are no objective standards as in maths or physics".

"Beautiful things" that "make your life better" are meaningless by that metric because "nobody makes money off those, they don't grow the economy, they're dumb and useless". Why will we need artists, when AI Art is the way forward?

Today, in our age of compulsory history courses, the kids love rap. What I would suggest as an alternative is introducing the inherently beautiful cultural artifacts and stories of history, and no trivia or random facts. Mozart is inherently beautiful regardless of any trivia about the composer and his origins. We should be teaching the beauties and greatnesses of history and fewer of the random tragedies that have no applicable moral lesson (eg Pompeii). Beauty can make someone’s life better, trivia can’t.

I love Mozart. I also know someone much more artistic than I am, much more knowledgeable about music, and who goes to operas and concerts, and who can't stand Mozart - their favourite composers are the Italian opera ones like Verdi 😀

"fewer of the random tragedies that have no applicable moral lesson (eg Pompeii)"

Luke 17:26-30

26 Just as it was in the days of Noah, so will it be in the days of the Son of Man. 27 They were eating and drinking and marrying and being given in marriage, until the day when Noah entered the ark, and the flood came and destroyed them all. 28 Likewise, just as it was in the days of Lot—they were eating and drinking, buying and selling, planting and building, 29 but on the day when Lot went out from Sodom, fire and sulfur rained from heaven and destroyed them all— 30 so will it be on the day when the Son of Man is revealed.

Whether it's a moral lesson or not, the story of Pompeii is how natural disasters strike, how people ignore or don't even recognise the warning signs, how we continue on with our ordinary lives as though we were immortal and nothing bad can happen, nothing that is not fixable because we are rich and powerful and the biggest cheese in our neck of the woods - then destruction comes on us in an instant, inescapable and irrevocable.

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