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parrhesia  1yr ago (parrhesia.substack.com)   2999 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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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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