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.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
History class was life-changing for me, so I feel duty bound to defend it. Why? Because it is where I learned to write. And in my school, it was the only subject apart from English where I could have learned to write. This Paul Graham essay is basically an attack on the idea of teaching writing entirely by getting kids to write about English literature, and I agree with it.
Why is history a good class to teach analytical/argumentative writing in. Firstly, because it isn't bullshit (in the Harry Frankfurt sense). There have been times and places where the history curriculum was full of lies, but it is only full of bullshit in late-stage totalitarian regimes. Literary criticism, on the other hand... This means that the teacher can insist on a distinction between valid and invalid arguments, and between good and bad use of evidence. Secondly, history is traditionally an "essay subject" so the teachers have the skills required to teach writing, which (say) geography teachers generally don't. Thirdly, the skills you need to "do history" at a high school level - i.e. assessment of documentary sources and developing a functional understanding of a complex sequence of events - can be tested through essay-writing (a pop quiz on dates and facts is a useful formative assessment, but the final summative assessment is all essays), whereas even if they include essay questions a geography exam is mostly mapwork and a physics exam (at least at high school level) is mostly demonstrating understanding by working out the correct formula to apply to a problem and plugging numbers into it.
You can learn to write in school, and it is a transferrable skill. In fact, it is one of the few transferrable skills you can teach (to the minority of kids who are able and willing to learn) in school at all. For me, it was history class where I did - and I strongly suspect that I am not the only one.
More options
Context Copy link