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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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I have an article coming soon arguing that this applies to all areas. I think education is tremendously wasteful. I would be more in favor of history if it was taught in a rigorous and more scientific way rather than in a more narrative form.

School serves multiple purposes:

  1. daycare

  2. instillment of the shared values

  3. making useful worker drones

  4. forcing kids to try a lot of stuff so they can choose what to do when they graduate

  5. making well-rounded self-sufficient citizens is the last and the most useless for "the man"

Which of these purposes would benefit from teaching history in a rigorous and more scientific way? #4 would, but who the hell cares about an improvement in the quality of history majors? #5 would, but that's just a step towards elite overproduction

Feel free to share that article as well.

Just be aware that this topic has already been explored by Brian Caplan and Freddie DeBoer, so try to argue something not talked about before.

There will be overlap of course but I think I’ll bring new ideas. This article wasn’t very well-received but at least it generated some discussion.

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