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parrhesia  1yr ago (parrhesia.substack.com)   2974 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.

I think a more unstructured education system where we just gather a bunch of history that is beautiful and let students pursue their interests would be more ethical. If it has to be structured, it needs to improve students critical thinking about the future, curent events, geopolitics, etc. I am skeptical that this is the case to any large extent.

I think a more unstructured education system where we just gather a bunch of history that is beautiful and let students pursue their interests would be more ethical.

This worked for moldbug or scott, but does it really work for the 'average american', or even the 95th percentile american? Looking at popular consumption of history, or popular culture generally ... 10 TOP HISTORY FAILS with a stablediffusion of lincoln soyfacing. Forcing students to read books they don't care about and fill out multiple choice questions is dumb, it keeps them from developing will to do things and solve problems in their own interests - but just letting them read and write about whatever they want is both impossible to implement and wouldn't work much better.

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