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parrhesia  1yr ago (parrhesia.substack.com)   3278 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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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.

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