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parrhesia  1yr ago (parrhesia.substack.com)   2971 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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Depends entirely on the teacher.

I've had some classes where a brain dead octogenarian drooled revisionist bullshit about 'States rights' out of their pie hole, and really excellent classes where a dude who refuses to wear anything but shorts, t shirts and flipflops forces everyone to pick a side in the revolution and argue that perspective for 15 minutes before switching instead of assigning homework.

Well, that's how we all start. We learn the Approved Version of the national myth, then we moved past it to greater detail as we got older and went on to other classes/grades. Though I think the Approved Version today has swung round to the "Founding Fathers all bad, slave-owners, racism" message.

But even the basic "dates, battles, places, famous names" version is something. I don't know how many times I've seen quotes bandied around online where even a basic, cursory knowledge of history would let you realise that "someone from that period would not have said that, they would not have expressed those views, those concepts and that language are from the 20th century". But people just swallow it that the Buddha or Abraham Lincoln or Moses said something along the lines of "Live, laugh, love". And that's down to chronological ignorance.

Worse, the Founding Fathers myth went straight from “Freedom, bitches!” to “Freedom to enslave and exploit, mwah hah hah!” without stopping at “Freedom to create, to trade, to own one’s own prosperity.” This is a mortal wound if no one defends it.

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