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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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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

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