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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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Notes -
Math Classes Are Mostly Useless
Americans are rather ignorant about math. Folk reasoning by math is usually bad - many common fallacies are based on math. Using math poorly can be misleading for making predictions - naive application of math is responsible for many ponzi schemes and lost investments. These facts suggest that the utility of math courses is overestimated. In fact, they are mostly useless.
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Even if they're useless for 80% of the population, and 10% of the population will learn it anyway, math/literature forced-education of some sort potentially causes a lot of people to make better decisions / be smarter / more productive than they otherwise would. Even if the right move is to filter most of the population out of history/math classes, and only keep 10-20% in ... that's still a very different message than 'history classes are useless'.
not that i'm a fan of schools or education!
If what we’re after is improving the reasoning of Americans, then we should orient a class around analyzing varied texts, understanding fallacies, appreciating good reasoning, and comprehending philosophical approaches and complex sentence structures.
Saying history class is good because 2% of the time they do this is like saying every student should spend 10 years learning the marine biology of the Mariana Trench because 2% of the time they read graph and statistics.
OP does not want to erase history class and replace it with thumb twiddling. Of course he would like to replace it with a class which more efficiently produces a desired character.
A good high-school level history class is spending 30-50% of the time on these things. The academic discipline of history is using written primary sources to understand a complex sequence of events. You need to memorize dates so you can put the events in chronological order, which is kind of basic to reasoning about cause and effect. My wife is trying to learn some history as part of research for her novel, and the biggest barrier to entry is that if you don't have key dates in your head you can't place the events you are reading about in sequence with your background knowledge.
You can't learn critical thinking without doing it, and you can't think critically without thinking critically about something. And you can't think critically about something without a basic level of domain knowledge. Compared to other high school subjects, history is a good (but by no means the only) way to do this.
I really do not think that a high school history class increases reasoning in such a way that makes it better than alternatives. It’s “peruse this text your teacher makes you read to highlight keywords and dates”. There’s no actual analysis. And the essays you have to write encourage basic opinions, based on basic topics.
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