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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 -
Oh, I apologise! I am very stupid and can't remember how I started a sentence when I come round to finish it.
I absolutely don't want this to be Science Versus Humanities, Round 92. But there is a certain attitude that "well all this art and culture stuff is all very well, but it's not practical, is it? If you're rich and frivolous you can waste time on it, but us hard-headed productive types who are creative and contributing to the economy have better things to do, and really schools should be for practical ends" going about, where when funding is tight or time needs to be pared down off the school week, it's the arts and music and so on that get the chop.
I think that impoverishes people, and I very much resent the idea that Culture is something for our betters, that the common mass of the likes of us can't appreciate it any more than a gorilla could, and we should just get on with learning to be a good cog in the economic machine. Not everybody is going to love history or music or art or English or the rest of it, but somebody will, and maybe that somebody is a kid from a home where these things aren't in the picture at all, and the exposure at school is their first taste of it.
See the arguments about AI art. I think that there is a real danger of some people who produce art being replaced, but a lot of that is commercial work for commercial purposes (and could just as well, or even better, be produced by machine than people). That is going to affect people who are trying to make a living from producing such art, as well as all the people doing side-line commissions of fandom art etc.
But the same way that the camera did not replace art entirely, and photography has become an art itself, I think that AI art can also become another tool for artists.
So the argument "Well nobody needs to study art anymore, it'll all be done by AI in future" isn't a good one.
I'll go a step further and say that if this was true, it would be even worse! If you press a button, and the computer reliably spits out a masterpiece that no human can hope to compete with, we'll just lose slowly lose the ability to express ourselves. It's a one-way ticket to Idiocracy.
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