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parrhesia  1yr ago (parrhesia.substack.com)   3280 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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Agreed with premise. History classes today are half trivia and half moral lessons. The trivia is meaningless, and the lessons are faulty. WW1 and American Revolution lessons are entirely trivia, with no influence on your appreciation for reality or ability to live a meaningful life. Lessons on women earning the right to vote become faulty morality: men for most of history were simply evil and putting women down, pay no attention to the impossibility of female enfranchisement without modern technology and a safe modern state.

I’m trying to think if there’s anything of value to be gained from history, and indeed there is: art history, the history of philosophy, and music history will present you with beautiful things that can genuinely inspire you and make your life better. Everything? The battles, the dates, the elections? No value. We’re not raising military generals, we are raising median adults. “War bad” is not a legitimate moral lesson.

I think a more unstructured education system where we just gather a bunch of history that is beautiful and let students pursue their interests would be more ethical. If it has to be structured, it needs to improve students critical thinking about the future, curent events, geopolitics, etc. I am skeptical that this is the case to any large extent.

we just gather a bunch of history that is beautiful

And who decides what is beautiful? We've had the criticised Foundation Myths version of history, where all the past was gleaming and glorious and all our heroes were flawless. Then we swung round to feet of clay, all muck and misery, racism and sexism forever.

I don't want somebody's idea of "beautiful" history. I never liked the "in the Matriarchal past, all was beer and skittles and then the awful men invented Patriarchy" version of history that some strains of loopy feminism mixed with Wicca produced in the 70s, and I don't want a modernised 21st century version of hippie history. I want the bad parts and the good parts, the entire human mess of it, the gold and the dung. Like Lenny sang, "You don't want to lie, not to the young".

And if we give them only the beautiful history, how then will they feel when they find out the parts we hid from them? How will they ever trust a teaching voice again? The Horrible History books, way back in the mists of time, took as their selling point "the gory bits they don't teach you in school" and the entire production has been immensely popular ever since.

I think a more unstructured education system where we just gather a bunch of history that is beautiful and let students pursue their interests would be more ethical.

This worked for moldbug or scott, but does it really work for the 'average american', or even the 95th percentile american? Looking at popular consumption of history, or popular culture generally ... 10 TOP HISTORY FAILS with a stablediffusion of lincoln soyfacing. Forcing students to read books they don't care about and fill out multiple choice questions is dumb, it keeps them from developing will to do things and solve problems in their own interests - but just letting them read and write about whatever they want is both impossible to implement and wouldn't work much better.

art history, the history of philosophy, and music history will present you with beautiful things that can genuinely inspire you and make your life better.

You're making the same mistake here. People who genuinely think "history useless" will have no use for art, music or philosophy history either. "What do I care who painted some dumb picture three hundred years ago? Yawn Rap is better than Mozart" and so on. We've had those very discussions on here before; 'schools should only teach STEM because those are real things that are useful when you get a job being creative and contributing to growing the economy, all that English and music crap can be faked up in ten minutes for an essay because there are no objective standards as in maths or physics".

"Beautiful things" that "make your life better" are meaningless by that metric because "nobody makes money off those, they don't grow the economy, they're dumb and useless". Why will we need artists, when AI Art is the way forward?

'schools should only teach STEM because those are real things that are useful when you get a job being creative and contributing to growing the economy, all that English and music crap can be faked up in ten minutes for an essay because there are no objective standards as in maths or physics".

Did you open with a single quote and close with a double quote to trigger me specifically?

Anyway, please let's not turn this into Wordcells vs. Shape Rotators, half of it seems to be friendly fire. As a proud STEMlord I have loads of respect for people who study history in order to preserve the beauty and wisdom of them past. On the other hand, half the post-modernist Brutalism-looks-good-actually people seem to come from the humanities. Surely we can get along, and unite against the Romans rather than the Judean People's Front?

Did you open with a single quote and close with a double quote to trigger me specifically?

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.

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.

Today, in our age of compulsory history courses, the kids love rap. What I would suggest as an alternative is introducing the inherently beautiful cultural artifacts and stories of history, and no trivia or random facts. Mozart is inherently beautiful regardless of any trivia about the composer and his origins. We should be teaching the beauties and greatnesses of history and fewer of the random tragedies that have no applicable moral lesson (eg Pompeii). Beauty can make someone’s life better, trivia can’t.

I love Mozart. I also know someone much more artistic than I am, much more knowledgeable about music, and who goes to operas and concerts, and who can't stand Mozart - their favourite composers are the Italian opera ones like Verdi 😀

"fewer of the random tragedies that have no applicable moral lesson (eg Pompeii)"

Luke 17:26-30

26 Just as it was in the days of Noah, so will it be in the days of the Son of Man. 27 They were eating and drinking and marrying and being given in marriage, until the day when Noah entered the ark, and the flood came and destroyed them all. 28 Likewise, just as it was in the days of Lot—they were eating and drinking, buying and selling, planting and building, 29 but on the day when Lot went out from Sodom, fire and sulfur rained from heaven and destroyed them all— 30 so will it be on the day when the Son of Man is revealed.

Whether it's a moral lesson or not, the story of Pompeii is how natural disasters strike, how people ignore or don't even recognise the warning signs, how we continue on with our ordinary lives as though we were immortal and nothing bad can happen, nothing that is not fixable because we are rich and powerful and the biggest cheese in our neck of the woods - then destruction comes on us in an instant, inescapable and irrevocable.

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