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parrhesia  1yr ago (parrhesia.substack.com)   2972 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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The thrust of this article can be generalized to almost everything taught in school. Most students will not remember physics, geography, biology, art, or anything else. The article is not pessimistic enough.

However, on a slight tangent. History education was useful for me (might not generalize to the population). I went to a British Curriculum school (Edexcel A-Level), and most of the curriculum was 20th century Europe based, WW1, WW2, Cold War.

History was useful (to me) not because of knowing facts or dates, but because certain patterns of societies doing certain things emerged. If anything this is the "true" reason to learn history (to not repeat mistakes of the past).

History is the training set for sociology or political science-based models.

Generally agree however I'd substitute 'realistic' for your "pessimistic." All authorities try to influence through education and especially the next generation.

Ideally, we would be taught self-knowledge/emotion mgt.(e.g. mindfulness) and critical thinking along with foundational humanities(+self-directed), basic STEM(+self-directed), life skills(e.g. home/car maintenance, budgeting, cooking, etc.) and for the love of god some generic sex-ed since we make half our adult decisions on some level of such attraction/aversion(conscious & especially unconscious).

[The following is one of many quotes I could have chosen]

"But if you look, the content of so-called modern education - very much orientated about material value. Not talking about inner value. So now, today, the best educated people, emotionally - lot of problem!" he says, and once again bursts into delighted laughter."

--The ancient wisdom the Dalai Lama hopes will enrich the world, BBC News, 13 March 2018

The goal of education should, IMO, be socially responsible adults in a society that not only permits but encourages individual creative expression.

I have an article coming soon arguing that this applies to all areas. I think education is tremendously wasteful. I would be more in favor of history if it was taught in a rigorous and more scientific way rather than in a more narrative form.

School serves multiple purposes:

  1. daycare

  2. instillment of the shared values

  3. making useful worker drones

  4. forcing kids to try a lot of stuff so they can choose what to do when they graduate

  5. making well-rounded self-sufficient citizens is the last and the most useless for "the man"

Which of these purposes would benefit from teaching history in a rigorous and more scientific way? #4 would, but who the hell cares about an improvement in the quality of history majors? #5 would, but that's just a step towards elite overproduction

Feel free to share that article as well.

Just be aware that this topic has already been explored by Brian Caplan and Freddie DeBoer, so try to argue something not talked about before.

There will be overlap of course but I think I’ll bring new ideas. This article wasn’t very well-received but at least it generated some discussion.

How can you identify patterns, if not through learning facts and dates? And of course, the facts you do learn (because nobody can learn all of them) are going to strongly influence your conclusions.

If anything this is the "true" reason to learn history (to not repeat mistakes of the past).

Depends on what you consider a mistake - was open immigration a mistake? Decolonization? The Town and Country Planning Act of 1947?

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