site banner
parrhesia  1yr ago (parrhesia.substack.com)   3281 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.

-4
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

'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.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats