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parrhesia  1yr ago (parrhesia.substack.com)   3277 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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Could be that history classes are useless for the median student, but a country greatly benefits from its elites knowing a bit of history.

Medical students learn history of medicine. How we gradually arrived to the modern medicine, what mistakes were made and so on.

We don't learn from history and our mistakes though. Covid vaccine mandates was a mistake that has been repeated. However, we don't commit many other mistakes, so maybe knowledge of history is useful after all.

I think that history classes are "mostly useless" but not entirely useless. I think history can unify people behind a culture, but unfortunately narrative style history can reinforce ideologies without rigorous checking on hypotheses. For example, elites now history now but their history would be often be framed as a class struggle between oppressors and oppressed. There is a lot of truth to this, to be fair, but I think selective exclusion of examples might give overconfidence.

I think history can unify people behind a culture,

I was going to top-level-comment about this, but since you've raised it yourself I'll simply reply.

Here's the thing; if you think that this is both possible and good, then you should think history classes under the Blue Tribe are worse than useless, because they are not preaching a unifying culture but what conservatives occasionally call an "anti-culture" that is inherently divisive.

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