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parrhesia  1yr ago (parrhesia.substack.com)   2990 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 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.

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