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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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Historical examples can be misleading for making predictions.

You know what's even more misleading for making predictions? A complete absence of historical examples. You're extrapolating way too much from "this thing is flawed" to "this thing is useless" without comparing it to the alternative. People are already really bad at critical thinking about events and politics, we don't need less we need more. Now, you can make a really good argument that history classes should be improved to deliver more value per time rather than making them longer (which I would be inclined to agree with). But the idea that they have no value to give is absurd.

Thanks for your thoughts MathWizard. Let me clarify something: I do not say "this thing is useless" or that history classes have "no value to give." Those are not quotations from the article.

That sort of absolute statement would be unmeasured. However, I do defend the thesis that "History Classes Are Mostly Useless." When I am critical of education, I try to be critical of practices as they currently exist. Of course I agree that "improved" classes that "deliver more value per time" is better than the current arrangement.

The problem with "history classes are mostly useless" is that this won't be used by those who can set what is taught in curricula for "we should improve history classes" but rather "we should junk history classes altogether and teach something Relevant To The Youth", in the same way they keep trying to dump the Dead White Males out of English classes. Culturally relevant texts then become something selected by a bunch of middle-class college-educated white liberals, or by activists from minority groups, and have little to do with what the kids in the class need.

So "history classes are mostly useless" may get used as the lever to dump history and instead indoctrinate the kids in the Correct, Officially Approved, way of thinking. The past was all racist, and all the bad people are on this side and all the good people are on that side.

Swapping out one set of simplistic bromides for another.

I explicitly say in this article that one of my concerns about history is the creation of ideological narratives, including the social justice narrative. If my argument is used for the opposite conclusion as I argue, it is not my fault.