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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 am always bemused by people insisting that history classes only ever teach a Schoolhouse Rock version of American history. I mean, maybe in first grade. Or maybe that's what everyone else's classes were like.
Mine were reasonably thorough (given the limited amount of time a junior high or high school class usually has to cover all of World or American history). Sure, there was a pro-America bias, but we weren't taught that the American Revolution and the Civil War and World War II was all Heroes vs. Villains. This view of some past era where American students were only ever taught a mythic version of American history reminds me of Gen-Zers nowadays who claim that past generations were "never taught" about America's history of racism and slavery. Well, excuse me, yes, we covered that too. You are not the first generation to discover the horrible truth that history is messy and gray and full of horrors.
Perhaps, but modeling the way the world works and likely consequences of political actions based on historical evidence (even at a very basic level of "Has this ever been tried before, and what happened?") is very useful.
Not if they are well taught. (If they're poorly taught, well, a poorly taught math or reading or science class is also mostly useless.)
Lack of historical perspective is in fact something I see very often here on TheMotte, even from very articulate effort-posters. I think we should have more historical education.
History, even poor history, classes will help at least somewhat against the whole revisionist idea of the past (unless, as seems increasingly the case, the institutions are captured and the ideologues get to set the curriculum where they push their views). Why is "Bridgerton" a fantasy version of Regency England and not realism? Even if there were black and other non-white people living in the UK at the time? Why doesn't it make sense to have Diverse and Inclusive communities in TV shows and movies that are set in the past, or a version of the past, even if those are fantasy? Why isn't it enough to say "This is fantasy, you can accept dragons and magic but not a black elf"? Why is this a fucking dumb thing to say? "It felt only natural to us that an adaptation of Tolkien’s work would reflect what the world actually looks like,” says Lindsey Weber, executive producer of the series."
If all you are getting is the rainbow diversity version of what the past supposedly looked like, then when you eventually come up some instance of how it really was, of course you are going to cry racism and all the other -isms and -phobes. But you are still wrong.
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