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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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If what we’re after is improving the reasoning of Americans, then we should orient a class around analyzing varied texts, understanding fallacies, appreciating good reasoning, and comprehending philosophical approaches and complex sentence structures.

A good high-school level history class is spending 30-50% of the time on these things. The academic discipline of history is using written primary sources to understand a complex sequence of events. You need to memorize dates so you can put the events in chronological order, which is kind of basic to reasoning about cause and effect. My wife is trying to learn some history as part of research for her novel, and the biggest barrier to entry is that if you don't have key dates in your head you can't place the events you are reading about in sequence with your background knowledge.

You can't learn critical thinking without doing it, and you can't think critically without thinking critically about something. And you can't think critically about something without a basic level of domain knowledge. Compared to other high school subjects, history is a good (but by no means the only) way to do this.

I really do not think that a high school history class increases reasoning in such a way that makes it better than alternatives. It’s “peruse this text your teacher makes you read to highlight keywords and dates”. There’s no actual analysis. And the essays you have to write encourage basic opinions, based on basic topics.

I am afraid you are all way overestimating influence of school education, especially history education.

See one historical event that is very important to the TPTB, historical event that is widely promoted to the point that special classes in schools are dedicated exclusively to teaching about this event (in addition to enormous space in popular mass media dedicated to this event)

Now, how effective was all this effort?

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/survey-finds-shocking-lack-holocaust-knowledge-among-millennials-gen-z-n1240031

https://www.claimscon.org/millennial-study/

A nationwide survey released Wednesday shows a "worrying lack of basic Holocaust knowledge" among adults under 40, including over 1 in 10 respondents who did not recall ever having heard the word "Holocaust" before.

The survey, touted as the first 50-state survey of Holocaust knowledge among millennials and Generation Z, showed that many respondents were unclear about the basic facts of the genocide. Sixty-three percent of those surveyed did not know that 6 million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, and over half of those thought the death toll was fewer than 2 million. Over 40,000 concentration camps and ghettos were established during World War II, but nearly half of U.S. respondents could not name a single one.

The 1619 Project and the rest of the politicised teaching is precisely why we need history classes in school - and yeah, first we start off with the basic, boring, dull 'learn off dates and places' version of history to give a foundation. After that, things like sources, where do we get our knowledge of the past, how do we construct narratives and critical thinking are part of it, or should be.

Otherwise, we end up with the packaged ideology version as above, which isn't history but is passed off as it.

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