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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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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.

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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