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parrhesia  1yr ago (parrhesia.substack.com)   2974 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 thrust of this article can be generalized to almost everything taught in school. Most students will not remember physics, geography, biology, art, or anything else. The article is not pessimistic enough.

However, on a slight tangent. History education was useful for me (might not generalize to the population). I went to a British Curriculum school (Edexcel A-Level), and most of the curriculum was 20th century Europe based, WW1, WW2, Cold War.

History was useful (to me) not because of knowing facts or dates, but because certain patterns of societies doing certain things emerged. If anything this is the "true" reason to learn history (to not repeat mistakes of the past).

History is the training set for sociology or political science-based models.

I have an article coming soon arguing that this applies to all areas. I think education is tremendously wasteful. I would be more in favor of history if it was taught in a rigorous and more scientific way rather than in a more narrative form.

Feel free to share that article as well.

Just be aware that this topic has already been explored by Brian Caplan and Freddie DeBoer, so try to argue something not talked about before.

There will be overlap of course but I think I’ll bring new ideas. This article wasn’t very well-received but at least it generated some discussion.

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