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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 -
Make a better argument to convince me that "Things that happened twenty years ago when I was still playing with dolls are of no moment to what is going on now, when I want to know how come I'm not getting all I want".
Lack of historical context is getting people into a lot of trouble. Or do you believe that "picnic" is a slur word because it refers to lynching parties? Without any sense of what is or is not in tune with a certain period, any demagogue can whip the public up about "this bad thing happened and you should riot in the streets!"
The teaching of history in schools may be poor. The attitude of students may be poor (like yours, where it's "why do I have to learn this boring stuff that has no practical use in my life?"). But without history, we're still stumbling around making the same stupid mistakes over and over, and being taken for a ride by interested parties who present their version of 'trufax' to us.
Ideologically motivate curriculum creators can also make narratives. I did not learn that picnic is a slur, but if that was a popular opinion, it wouldn't be surprising to see this belief inserted into education.
Those interested parties can gain control over what is taught. If you want to defend the idea that we should teach history in a non-ideological and rigorous way so as to prevent manipulation by politicians, then yes. That's a great idea. But I still accept the viewpoint that history classes as they stand today in USA, are mostly useless.
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