History Classes Are Mostly Useless
Americans are rather ignorant about history. Moral reasoning by historical analogy is bad. Historical examples can be misleading for making predictions.
If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you might notice that I’m rather cynical about education generally. I think the benefits exist, but they are drastically overstated, and a lot of children’s time is wasted. It’s not right to force children into doing things for their benefit if they are hardly benefitting. I don’t think much of schooling passes the cost-benefit test. And I’d argue history courses are no exception to this. Although, perhaps the basics are worthwhile.
History courses are likely some of the more common courses students take throughout their primary and secondary schooling. People seem to retain some knowledge of American history. Still, the amount they remember is not particularly impressive, and much of this retained knowledge can probably be attributed to relearning the content through other means. For example, people might only remember some facts about World War II because they watch The History Channel or enjoy listening to the occasional history podcast.
has an excellent book called The Case Against Education, where he lays out why he thinks we should fund education less. He knows that education gives you a higher wage, but he thinks this should be rather mysterious if we don’t consider the phenomenon of signaling. Two important reasons are that students forget what they learn, and the content is irrelevant. Here is what he found about public knowledge when researching the topic of history and civics:What does the average American learn in school besides basic literacy and numeracy? Precisely how much of our knowledge of history, civics, science, and foreign languages do we owe to education? Once again, we can use surveys of adult knowledge to put a ceiling on the answer.
Starting with history and civics, all national surveys find severe ignorance. The American Revolution Center tested 1,001 adult Americans’ knowledge of the American Revolution. Eighty-three percent earned failing grades. The Intercollegiate Studies Institute tested over 2,500 adult Americans’ knowledge of American government and American history. Seventy-one percent earned failing grades. Newsweek magazine gave 1,000 Americans the U.S. Citizenship Test. Thirty-eight percent scored too low to become citizens of their own country. On the 2000 American “National Election Study, the typical person got 48% of the factual questions right; you would expect 28% by guessing. These results are consistent with a vast academic literature on Americans’ (lack of) political knowledge.
You could blame low scores on the difficulty of the tests rather than the ignorance of the test takers. When you read them, however, you’ll notice the public struggles with easy multiple choice questions. How many American adults know the Bill of Rights is part of the Constitution? The American Revolution Center reports a dismal 57%, but the truth is far worse. Since there were only four response options, you would expect roughly 25% of the ignorant to guess the right answer by chance. And this is no isolated blind spot. Table 2.3 shows some other basic history and civics questions, with scores corrected for guessing.
One could look at these facts and conclude the public’s historical and civic knowledge is no worse than its literacy. Yet such optimism overlooks a key point: knowing half a subject’s basic facts does not make you “halfway proficient.” If you know only half the letters in the alphabet, you are illiterate. Why? Because you lack knowledge of basic facts on which all reading depends. The same holds for the ABCs of history and civics. Not knowing the three branches of government isn’t like not knowing Hamlet; it’s like not knowing the letter “h.” If you don’t know that the Civil War came after the Declaration of Independence, you don’t understand American history. If you don’t know which parties control the House and the Senate, you don’t understand American politics.
The average American high school graduate completes four years of history/social studies coursework. Four years: ample time to learn the ABCs of history and civics by heart, to acquire the knowledge base to discuss America’s past, present, and future. Yet few adults possess this knowledge. If we owe everything we know about history and civics to history and civics classes, we owe next to nothing. (Caplan, 2018, pp. 62 - 64)
Some interpret a lack of knowledge as a reason to push students harder or hire better teachers. I don't see it this way. I think of the brain as a sort of leaky bucket. If you do not continue to fill it with the things that you want to know, you will not retain the information. There are obvious exceptions to this, such as events so emotionally intense they are burned into one’s memory until the day they die. Many people can operate in everyday life okay without knowing the three branches of government or the contents of the Bill of Rights. I think that’s perfectly fine, and forcing children to learn content they will not remember is largely a waste of their time. Some children will never be historians, and that is okay.
Some believe that to be an informed voter, you must have this knowledge, and so it is essential to make children learn it when they’re young. This seems like a really bad way to get an informed voting population. If someone needs to know something, teach them that information right before they need to use it. Don’t tell them about it decades before they need to use it, and hope they remember information irrelevant to their everyday lives for whatever reason. If informed voters are worthwhile, inform them as adults through some means immediately before voting. This would be orders of magnitude more efficient time-wise. It is odd that people view it as legitimate to have compulsory schooling over a decade but hardly ever think it’s appropriate to have compulsory schooling for adults. This is a point I’ve made in a previous article.
If we imagine that the students learned the content, how beneficial is knowledge of history? One issue with teaching history is that the average person seems particularly bad at decoupling. They struggle to disassociate ideas, making them susceptible to trickery through word games. For example, I’ve listened to interviews and discussions about genetic enhancement, and the interviewers or hostile critics often want to associate the practice with Nazism and coercive eugenics. Historical examples are supposed to be informative, but they seem to cloud people’s thinking sometimes. There are possible reasons one could critique genetic enhancement, but I believe many people feel persuaded by the feeling that it reminds them of Nazi-style eugenics.
Making analogies can make something appear morally worse than it actually is. Does it provide moral insight to compare wokeism to the cultural revolution? It doesn't seem easy to learn more about the morality of a cultural phenomenon through mere comparison to another. Imagine I say, “Trump is like Hitler for reason X,” and you already know about reason X. Do you gain any moral insight by learning this fact? I don’t think so. I think this tricks your brain through association to view Trump as worse, but it shouldn’t be possible to change your moral evaluation without learning more about Trump’s actions.
You could argue that these comparisons with historical figures could provide insight into future events, aiding in making predictions about what will happen. If I know that the current state of the country has something in common with the state of the country soon before the Civil War, then maybe I can predict that another civil war is more likely. I’m not so sure this is useful. When we reason about complicated processes, we need to use data rather than anecdotes. Knowing about single historical events, especially important ones, often distorts our thinking, in my view.
Trying to reason through historical examples is like trying to reason about the future by watching the news. The news is interesting because it highlights important or unusual events, but one should be careful about reasoning about the world through their knowledge of the news. For example, the news may make you overestimate a phenomenon like police killing unarmed black men (Skeptic, 2021). Similar to how you don’t necessarily easily recall historical examples of high political tension defusing peacefully, you might not recall examples of when a police officer did not kill someone. The sample that you recall from is not random, and the process of recalling is not unbiased.
Furthermore, not only is the sample of historical examples not necessarily random, but it is also often curated to tell a specific narrative that is flattering to one’s nation or appeals to the ideology of the curriculum makers. Given a vast expanse of history, with millions of historical events, it becomes possible to create a curriculum that tells almost any narrative you want. In America, one of the most dominant historical narratives is that history is a struggle between the oppressor classes—men, whites, heterosexuals, the rich—and the oppressed class—ethnic minorities, women, LGBTQ+, and the poor. Another possible curated narrative might highlight all the good actions of the American government or the oppressor class without describing any atrocities and failures.
Unless one wants to use statistical methods to summarize historical data or take a rigorous approach of mentioning every recorded instance of a phenomenon, one must curate a history curriculum. Are these curated examples informative?
Phil Tetlock has spent his career researching what makes people good at forecasting the future. In his book Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?, he distinguishes hedgehogs—the more ideologically rigid and less accurate forecasters—from the better forecasters, which he calls the foxes. He goes to great lengths to describe the thinking of foxes. One part of the book partially motivated a previous article I wrote, “Beware the Historical Analogy.” In his book, Tetlock described the dangers of using analogical reasoning:
Psychological skeptics argue that such results bode ill for our ability to distill predictive patterns from the hurly-burly of current events. Insofar as history repeats itself, it does not do so in a ploddingly mechanistic fashion. Much analogical reasoning from history is, however, plodding. Consider the impact of the Vietnam War on the political consciousness of late twentieth-century pundits who saw a variety of conflicts, almost surely too great a variety, as Vietnam-style quagmires. The list includes Nicaragua, Haiti, Bosnia, Colombia, Afghanistan, and Iraq (all new American Vietnams), Afghanistan (the Soviet Union’s Vietnam), Chechnya (Russia’s Vietnam), Kashmir (India’s Vietnam), Lebanon (Israel’s Vietnam), Angola (Cuba’s Vietnam), the Basque territory (Spain’s Vietnam), Eritrea (Ethiopia’s Vietnam), Northern Ireland (Britain’s Vietnam), and Kampuchea (Vietnam’s Vietnam) (Tetlock, 1998). We know—from many case studies—that overfitting the most superficially applicable analogy to current problems is a common source of error (Neustadt & May, 1986). We rarely hear policy makers, in private or public, invoking mixtures of probabilistic analogies: “Saddam resembles Hitler in his risk taking, but he also has some of the shrewd street smarts of Stalin, the vaingloriousness of Mussolini, and the demagoguery of Nasser, and the usefulness of each analogy depends on the context.” (Tetlock, 2006, pp. 37-38)
It is not that history should provide us with no details. It is that using a single historical comparison is likely to be uninformative both morally and empirically. Not always, of course. For example, to understand why a nation’s flag has its colors or where the border between nations is, you might need to know a specific story. But when trying to make predictions, historical analogies can lead one astray for the same reasons that interesting anecdotes are not particularly informative. When discussing IQ, people will bring up Richard Feynman’s supposed 125 IQ because it is a particularly interesting counter-example to the importance of IQ. Still, this particular example is highlighted because it is incredibly weird, and unsurprisingly this example is likely to be untrue (see Gwern and Steve Hsu on this).
History isn’t uninformative, but we really ought to be careful. There is a wealth of information, but it is perhaps best to examine history through a quantitative lens rather than highlighting examples to create a narrative. This narrative is often ideological. Telling a story through anecdotes makes it difficult to refute without supplying different counter anecdotes. And then determining who is correct relies on getting an overall frequency.
An example of historical analysis that I like is Gregory Clark’s The Son Also Rises, in which he examines the historical records to discover the rate of persistence of social status across the world using surnames. If Clark told 30 different stories about elites having elite children, it would likely be more intriguing for the average person, but it should be less persuasive. For me, it is an interesting book because of the methods. I think Clark’s sort of approach to historical analysis should be more common. Although, I doubt that his book will ever be taught in public schools across America anytime soon.
The way I would generalize your critique: schools should be teaching skills, not facts.
As Caplan covered in The Case Against Education, all evidence points to the retention of information learned during schooling to be quite poor--perhaps even nonexistant. This makes sense considering what we now about how learning works. We retain pieces of information that we are exposed to repeatedly and forget information that is only encountered once. This is the principle of spaced repetition.
School is most useful for jumpstarting feedback loops: situations where once a student is exposed to a concept or skill, they will naturally practice it during the course of their life.
Reading is a good example of this. While the initial process of learning to read is painful for many students, once they learn how to read, they will get practice without having to actively nurture the skill. In a modern civilization, there is text everywhere. At the supermarket when you're reading ingredients off the back label. At the doctor's office when you're filling out a questionaire. That's not even accounting for the internet which is where the vast majority of children and teenagers get their daily reading experience.
So reading is useful to teach in school. What else is useful? Arithmetic. Similar to reading, arithmetic is painful to learn at first. But once you learn how to do it, it's a skill that is consistently reinforced--exactly what the literature on spaced repetition says is the key to retaining what was learned.
With this framework, it's clear why history is uniquely bad amongst school subjects: no basic skills are being taught. Nominally, it's supposed to teach "critical thinking" skills, but you can't teach that since "critical thinking" is mostly just another name for intellegence. So in practice, history is about memorizing dates and presidents. Useless.
History is supposed to give you a general vibe about what is and isn't high status, what is and isn't taboo.
What most people are going to get from The Bill of Rights isn't when it was drafted or even what's in it. They are going to take away the concept that American citizens have inviolable rights, and that they are and the basis of our societal values.
Similarly, the whole corpus of history and civics will inculcate the idea that freedom and equality before the law are core animating principals of what it means to be American, and that this is an important part of what makes our nation great.
That animating principle is important to imbue in people.
I suggest that everyone is going to end up with something like a basic metaphysical vibe of who they are and what their society is about. It could be that old school civics, or it could be something else. I wouldn't want someones basic unconscious prior to be wokeism or marxism or whatever.