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parrhesia  1yr ago (parrhesia.substack.com)   3282 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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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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