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parrhesia  1yr ago (parrhesia.substack.com)   2976 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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Math Classes Are Mostly Useless

Americans are rather ignorant about math. Folk reasoning by math is usually bad - many common fallacies are based on math. Using math poorly can be misleading for making predictions - naive application of math is responsible for many ponzi schemes and lost investments. These facts suggest that the utility of math courses is overestimated. In fact, they are mostly useless.

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Even if they're useless for 80% of the population, and 10% of the population will learn it anyway, math/literature forced-education of some sort potentially causes a lot of people to make better decisions / be smarter / more productive than they otherwise would. Even if the right move is to filter most of the population out of history/math classes, and only keep 10-20% in ... that's still a very different message than 'history classes are useless'.

not that i'm a fan of schools or education!

This makes my argument look worse because it changes a word in my premise. But changing a word drastically alters the argument. For example:

Article:

Title: Eating animals is wrong

Subtitle: Animals are in inhumane conditions. Animals suffer a lot! Do not eat them.

Comment:

Eating plants is wrong

Plants are in inhumane conditions. Plants suffer a lot! Do not eat them.

Obviously, you cannot refute my argument by changing the meaning/words in the argument.

I did not say 'history classes are useless.' I said "history classes are mostly useless."

I actually endorse the animals/plants comparison because suffering is only bad in that it is absence-of-goodness, or deprival of goodness or ability of some sort - not-killing-animals by replacing them with plants causes the animals to not ever exist, which is transparently worse than existing and dying, whether that death is by human or natural hands. So the suffering you're preventing is just the animal's knowledge of its terrible situation and untimely end, which isn't made better by not living at all. Plants suffer too - they have 'pain responses' and attempt to avoid death and deprival - but their suffering is manifestly less because of their lesser capability.

My point was that even if only a small minority of students get something out of history, it's still worth teaching, and the same is true of math. And maybe the math and history rub off a bit on the students who mostly aren't getting anything out of it. Now, as an entirely separate educational issue, and this is much of why most math and history education is pointless - students are taught both history and math in a way totally detached from any practical use by the student, the student can't even act out miniature versions of historical lessons in their own goals or trials because there are none other than 'do what the teacher says to do' homework assignments, and sports or video games, neither of which even attempt to replicate the complexity of human organization or technical development. So nobody is actually learning how to govern a country, or even how to run a furniture factory or improve a product for one's own use - what does one even use of one's own making? Kids should be making real products and having real political struggles - real in the sense they have complex, organic ties to output or real goals - in miniature.

If what we’re after is improving the reasoning of Americans, then we should orient a class around analyzing varied texts, understanding fallacies, appreciating good reasoning, and comprehending philosophical approaches and complex sentence structures.

Saying history class is good because 2% of the time they do this is like saying every student should spend 10 years learning the marine biology of the Mariana Trench because 2% of the time they read graph and statistics.

OP does not want to erase history class and replace it with thumb twiddling. Of course he would like to replace it with a class which more efficiently produces a desired character.

Of course he would like to replace it with a class which more efficiently produces a desired character.

Here's where I start swearing like a trooper. Every time a government starts mucking around with education to produce "desired character", students end up more fucking ignorant than before. I can't speak to America, but governments of all stripes in my country keep fiddling around with the curriculum to appease potential employers and churn out workplace-ready drones. Back in the 80s it was a push to learn foreign languages, particularly German, since the school leavers (17-18 years of age) would have to emigrate to find work. Need I say our language proficiency is still terrible? In the 90s biotechnology was going to be the coming thing. In the 00s it was computers. Now it's still heavy emphasis on STEM.

Which is great, but not everybody can 'learn to code' and not everybody is good at maths. There is also the pressure from the other side, of "Why did I have to do X/Y/Z subject in school, it's boring and irrelevant?" from parents and from former students.

Nobody ever considers "I was too stupid for the subject", no, it's "this is boring". However, for a bunch of teenagers, everything is boring except if they have a particular interest, so they don't want to learn anything. That's why we have compulsory schooling and subjects you have to take, sorry, don't care if you're bored and would rather be messing around on your phone or hanging out with your friends.

It's not until much later in life you realise "I wish I had paid more attention in class" or "I wish I knew more about X/Y/Z".

Yeah, a lot of people won't know, won't care and can get on without X/Y/Z. But the point of school is not just to churn out workplace ready drones who can be slotted in and out of whatever role employers want right this minute, it's to educate you, to expose you to a range of things so that you can see what is out there in the world.

And without such classes, then we end up with "the History Channel - all Nazis all the time!" because that's what sells.

Now - do schools teach subjects badly, are curricula terribly designed, do we try to cram everyone into 'one size fits all'? Yes to all those. But "a class which more efficiently produces a desired character" is not going to happen by tweaks and new pedagogical theories - again, I think the US has experimented with all those, from No Child Left Behind to 'no teaching to read using phonics', and there is furious debate over how well all those have worked.

First, we have to define what, exactly, is the character we desire to produce, and why, and for whose benefit.

Second, we have to find a method that will do such, and that does mean trying to overcome "I'm bored, I don't want to be here, the apps on my phone are more interesting and attention-grabbing and have hooked my brain successfully because that is what they're designed to do" in the mass of students because kids won't realise until years later that they do need to know this, or they would get benefit out of that.

Worst of all is the situation I think we're approaching right now, where kids don't know stuff, don't care about being ignorant, and instead use the demands of the day to get their own way - like the Muslim student who got an art history professor fired over historical Muslim depictions of Mohammed, because they've been inculcated successfully in 'structural racism, identity politics, ignorance is the most powerful weapon, and loud screaming gets me my way'. A functional university would have stood up for the professor and reminded the student what the purpose of an education is. This university is instead dedicated to 'more efficiently producing a desired character', which is one of ignorant entitlement based on manipulating the woke weapons of today.

If what we’re after is improving the reasoning of Americans, then we should orient a class around analyzing varied texts, understanding fallacies, appreciating good reasoning, and comprehending philosophical approaches and complex sentence structures.

A good high-school level history class is spending 30-50% of the time on these things. The academic discipline of history is using written primary sources to understand a complex sequence of events. You need to memorize dates so you can put the events in chronological order, which is kind of basic to reasoning about cause and effect. My wife is trying to learn some history as part of research for her novel, and the biggest barrier to entry is that if you don't have key dates in your head you can't place the events you are reading about in sequence with your background knowledge.

You can't learn critical thinking without doing it, and you can't think critically without thinking critically about something. And you can't think critically about something without a basic level of domain knowledge. Compared to other high school subjects, history is a good (but by no means the only) way to do this.

I really do not think that a high school history class increases reasoning in such a way that makes it better than alternatives. It’s “peruse this text your teacher makes you read to highlight keywords and dates”. There’s no actual analysis. And the essays you have to write encourage basic opinions, based on basic topics.

I am afraid you are all way overestimating influence of school education, especially history education.

See one historical event that is very important to the TPTB, historical event that is widely promoted to the point that special classes in schools are dedicated exclusively to teaching about this event (in addition to enormous space in popular mass media dedicated to this event)

Now, how effective was all this effort?

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/survey-finds-shocking-lack-holocaust-knowledge-among-millennials-gen-z-n1240031

https://www.claimscon.org/millennial-study/

A nationwide survey released Wednesday shows a "worrying lack of basic Holocaust knowledge" among adults under 40, including over 1 in 10 respondents who did not recall ever having heard the word "Holocaust" before.

The survey, touted as the first 50-state survey of Holocaust knowledge among millennials and Generation Z, showed that many respondents were unclear about the basic facts of the genocide. Sixty-three percent of those surveyed did not know that 6 million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, and over half of those thought the death toll was fewer than 2 million. Over 40,000 concentration camps and ghettos were established during World War II, but nearly half of U.S. respondents could not name a single one.

The 1619 Project and the rest of the politicised teaching is precisely why we need history classes in school - and yeah, first we start off with the basic, boring, dull 'learn off dates and places' version of history to give a foundation. After that, things like sources, where do we get our knowledge of the past, how do we construct narratives and critical thinking are part of it, or should be.

Otherwise, we end up with the packaged ideology version as above, which isn't history but is passed off as it.

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