Is the knowledge of history important to you or is it just trivia?

In My Humble Opinion
1

This original motivation for this poll was to understand the mindset of today’s college generation but all ages are welcome.

I enjoy studying history but I realize that not everyone shares that enthusiasm. I’m just wondering how other folks view the subject of history.

I put some thoughts to help frame your opinions:

[ul]
[li]Do you feel history in general is just useless trivia (memorizing dates of kings and wars)?[/li][li]Do you think knowledge of your own country’s history is important but other countries/continents are not important?[/li][li]Do you think history of a certain time period is important (date-of-birth minus 10 years) but anything before that is trivia?[/li][li]Do you feel “those who don’t learn history are doomed to repeat it” is just an empty platitude regurgitated by history teachers?[/li][li]If you had children, do you think it would be more productive for society if they were given the option to substitute history classes for other subjects such as math or English?[/li][/ul]

I don’t intend for people to answer all those questions… it’s just a device to help extract opinions.

2

I think history is generally useful, though I focus mainly on politics in the last fifty years or so. However, while events in the nineteenth century and before are important, their effects on today are generally pretty indirect, and I don’t think of them or from that perspective remotely often.

3

Total history buff here, but I’m a tail-end baby boomer, (i.e., not a college kid) if that matters.

4

Useless trivia? It depends on how it’s presented. My preference–offering the disclaimer that anthropology and history were my fields in college, though at 23 I think I’m part of “today’s college generation”–is to consider history a series of stories, or perhaps one large story with infinite subplots that constantly intertwine and cross-over. I think it is far less important to know the date that World War I began than it is to understand the story of all the various powers that climaxed in that moment.

To be caught up on the story of history, you need to be familiar with the characters and the settings, but it depends on what parts are interesting to you. If your favourite part of history is the US-UK romance arc, then perhaps Alexander’s Greece is of less importance to you. If you want to use the backstory to grok the present-day, I tend to think of things as something of an inverted pyramid, converging at this moment, where you need more finely-refined knowledge at each step down. To understand present-day Afghanistan, I think you need a keen appreciation of the last five years, a strong appreciation of the last thirty, a weaker understanding of the last hundred, and so on.

That said, I do dislike the “those who don’t know their history…” bit. For one, I think it’s untrue; I would argue that basic human nature is a more substantial driver of how we act than our remembrance of times past, and that history is more useful as a tool for understanding things than as a means of controlling them. For two, I dislike the slightly functionalist aspects of the quote–like, “here’s why you should learn history”. No, you should learn history because it’s interesting, not because you think it will get you something somehow.

5

I grew up pretty much like Kevin Arnold of The Wonder Years - no sense of history or place. Pretty much the same time too, I was aware as I entered high school that there was a serious decision to make when I turned 18, but Saigon fell when I was a freshmen IIRC and that became moot. I didn’t learn of the big events of the 60s or before until much later. Due to school switching and acceleration, I actually graduated with no classes in history, only some quick and dirty “self study”.

I never understood how the Young Republicans at college could be so sure of anything, they were positively giddy as Reagan was elected. I might point out that one of them, the leader of Student Council, has recently become the head of RNC. He still speaks with the same certainty, but maybe with more years of history under my belt, he is more transparent to me.

What I mean to say is that history is big and complex and full of trends and hidden patterns and all, and we can each only master or observe so much of it in a lifetime, but that it is worth it, and also probably worth it to temper certainty when interpreting history at all ages.

6

Alex, thanks for a very thoughtful answer considering I had low expectations for the turnout of this thread. :slight_smile:

Do you favor the “Great Man” theory of history or a " bottom up social movements" version? (I have guess based on your study of anthropology.)

I have other questions for you (some items I disagree with) but I’ll save those for later.

7

Well said I think and this part is especially intriguing - when I was in college, the "word on the street was that USSR (remember them!) was bankrupting themselves in Afghanistan fighting a nation that had outlasted invaders many times over the millenia without fail.

Am I the only one who remembers this?

8

[quote=“Ruminator, post:1, topic:495697”]

[ul]
[li]Do you feel history in general is just useless trivia (memorizing dates of kings and wars)? [/li][/QUOTE]

Only if you have a bad teacher. I always told my students that I couldn’t care less if they remember dates and I would never have them on a test so long as they remember chronology (which is what dates are there for) as it’s the “big picture” that’s important. The interesting moments of individual lives or time periods in history is best used as seasoning, the meat being the times themselves, if that makes any sense. (Original analogy involved ambergris but I can’t think of a really good one.)

[QUOTE]
[li]Do you think knowledge of your own country’s history is important but other countries/continents are not important?[/li][/QUOTE]

I think they’re inseparable. (Well, in general; I realize it’s impossible to be up on the history of Burkina Faso and Uzbekistan and all other nations and that the U.S. isn’t connected to everything in their particular histories, but the history of the U.S.A. and of the superpower nations and of the regions of the world Burkina Faso and Uzbekistan are in is at least super linked.) The U.S.A. began due to events in Europe and Africa, became an important sidenote in the histories of other lands due to the many diasporas (the Irish, the Chinese, the Jews, etc.), and when it became a super-power (largely because of its multiculturalism) it influenced the history of most other places.

[QUOTE]
[li]Do you think history of a certain time period is important (date-of-birth minus 10 years) but anything before that is trivia?[/li][/QUOTE]

I think there are certain time periods that are more important than others to understanding the world today (e.g. I’d emphasize the Civil War [and it’s prologue/aftermath] over the Mexican-American War or even World War II over World War I in how it shaped the Cold War) but since they all build on one another it’s impossible to call any period unimportant. That said the Mexican-American war is pretty damned important- I wouldn’t make students memorize the details of Buena Vista but I would want them to know what it was about, and World War I (probably the most forgotten of America’s really bloody war- the one that NEVER gets taught in high schools beyond an “it happened” treatment in my experience- was pretty damned important for the entire world. And even the Spanish American War, which seems a footnote, was of extreme importance, America’s real entry into world superpowers.

[QUOTE]
[li]Do you feel “those who don’t learn history are doomed to repeat it” is just an empty platitude regurgitated by history teachers?[/li][/QUOTE]

I love Mark Twain’s variation on that phrase: “History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme”. Anybody who can look at the serious mistakes of the war in Iraq will get an idea of how bad things can happen when you don’t learn history (and not just the current U.S. involvement; the fact that people who had hated each other since centuries before living memory were forcibly stapled together into a country showed a disregard and arrogance that damned it from the start and made a Saddam Hussein inevitable if there was to be any kind of order).

Hmm. English, yes, since (at least in my experience) so much of upper high school English courses can be repetetive and so much of literature is frankly lost on 16 and 17 year olds [not pointing fingers- I couldn’t appreciate a lot of it then, and yes, I know there are exceptions]). I think history will be more important to their understanding of vital events than literature will be. (It’s a pity that people aren’t required to study literature when they’re 30 and have some life experience and sense of time passing and can understand it better, but…). While I personally was a terrible math student, I don’t think it should be sacrificed.

Though one of my favorite courses in college was Math History.:smiley: GREAT COURSE, both for the history AND the math (and even the philosophy). In Math History (which was not a crip course and which did require learning a good bit of math and having to do fairly complicated equations and the like, you learn not just how to figure angles but why people figured them out, or how the advances in mathematics led to the advances in technology that changed the world, and just how important the Arabs were to human advancement (not saying for a second that this in any way exonerates Fundamentalist Islam today). It’s more than just trivia in other words, and I think there should be a lot more consilience in college and even high school courses since knowledge is far more Mulligan stew than ala carte.

9

I screwed up and forgot to add this opinion generator in the OP:

[ul]
[li]Is the importance of history knowledge made obsolete because of today’s technology – information at your fingertips via google and wikipedia?[/li][/ul]

(I was wondering if some folks think “googling” makes history knowledge in the brain obsolete similar to how calculators and spreadsheets made slide rules of the 1960s obsolete.)

10

24 year old here.
I think History is a fascinating subject when it’s taught well, and I think one is able to glean things from history quite well to apply to the modern world. Religion, Politics, games, and entertainment, and even human relationships can be tied to historical examples, precedences, figures, and even legends and cultural aspects.

It’s a fun subject to think about, and I enjoy learning about it in my spare time. I don’t think there’s really a career in it, but I’m science kinda guy. But I certainly see the value of having anecdotal data, evidence, and first hand observations all piled up right back there waiting to be examined and learned.

11

Naw. Google and Wiki make it easier, but if you don’t know who was involved in the French and Indian Wars or why they happened, you’re going to need to do more than look it up on Wikipedia to understand what went down. If you have some idea of the circumstances, that makes it much easier to find out more.

12

In school, history was mostly boring. When I started reading on my own, I realized that I love reading history. It’s one of my favorite things now. History can be useless trivia if it’s taught badly, but it shouldn’t be.

I think knowing the whole world’s history is important, partly in order to understand our own but also because we live in a world, not in a bubble. How can we understand the American Revolution without knowing about the European Enlightenment and colonialism? If we don’t know something about how we fit into world history, we get bubble-vision, as if our own country is far more important than any other.

No; it’s all connected. Everything has a cause, which is found further back.

I think it has some value, but (as above) human nature is a strong player. One can hope to learn the big lessons: never get involved in a land war in Asia, never invite another country to come in and help you get rid of your bad guy, etc.

I do have children, and I homeschool, so I get to choose exactly what we study. If I wanted to replace math with history, I could! (But I don’t.) We do quite a lot of history, though. We treat history chronologically and from a world perspective, so we start with ancient history and look at what everyone was doing. It’s more like one long story, and you can see how different societies influenced each other (for example this year we read about new ideas developing in Europe, which American colonists picked up and used for the Revolution, which inspired the French to try their own revolution, which didn’t work out so well…). They’re still pretty young, so we treat it as fun storytime with interesting activities and coloring pages, etc., and history is one of their favorite things to do. I do plan on studying a lot of history, but we also study a lot of math and language arts. For younger kids, the priority is reading, math, and writing before history and science, which are sort of the dessert to our studies.

13

I definitely don’t believe the history of my country or of any other country is trivial, but I like trivia games in general and knowing the trivial bits of history is fun by itself.

Honestly, I probably know more history in a trivial way (dates and places and notable people…) than I do in a more academic sense (understanding how it all fits together).

I have a son who will be facing high school in the not too distant future and I would rather he study Math than History, assuming the option to substitute. English and History would be about even.

That assumes a relative weighting of subjects. I wouldn’t want to see History replaced by another subject completely.

I don’t necessarily believe that “those who don’t learn history are doomed to repeat it.” In a way, I think we are all doomed to repeat it regardless.

14

Caveat: I am a historian.

It is vastly important to me, and for one basic reason: Your being here, and every single thing in your life and around you, has been directly affected by history in some way. A Canadian guy sitting in his apartment in Toronto could certainly think “history is just trivia,” but it doesn’t change the fact that his butt sitting in the chair is the product of an exceedingly long and complicated history, and only by the whims of fate ending up in exactly the right positions is he there.

History is intimately tied to huge numbers of other disciplines–directly to anthropology, archaeology, sociology, and indirectly to everything from English to chemistry. Knowing what came first provides essential clues to understanding the root cause or problem of any one situation.

Just Googling something or looking it up is not a sufficient substitute. An encyclopaedia article is not going to give you the nuanced understanding of a subject that a real book or course of study would. People who believe that it will are probably of the school who believe history is series of rote-memorized names and dates and doesn’t actually bear any relevance to today’s world. (As for memorization–I remember very little from the high-school history class whose teacher made us memorize every friggin’ battle of the American Civil War in chronological order, but I remember tons about the elementary-school history courses that focused on the way history actually happened and left dates to the side.)

But I am biased.

15

Another historian here. (Although I have yet to find a job in the field, sadly) Look at it this way: you always see movies where someone goes back in time and does something that changes the future. Look at history from that perspective. Everything affects everything else. You wouldn’t have had WWII without WWI. The Nazis would never have gained power if they hadn’t been able to exploit the humiliation Germans felt over their defeat in WWI. (or, as it was known then, the Great War).
One thing that thoroughly annoys me is when people talk about how much worse society is becoming, that everyone is becoming so horrid and crude, etc – without realizing that people have been saying that since the beginning of time.

History sort of ties EVERYTHING together. In order to understand current events, you have to know something of the history behind them.

I think it’s like the whole, “step on one little butterfly, and you change the entire future” sort of theory. In order to prepare for the future, you have to learn about the past.
Now, that’s the serious side. On the not-so serious , I love trivia, I LOVE history, I just freaking love it. (I’d also love to dress like I lived prior to the mid-sixties. sigh) And the state of the History Channel right now makes me want to kick someone right in the crotch.

16

:smiley: I was just now reading an ancient Roman complaining about how horribly everyone brings up their children nowadays, is it any wonder all the young men are so awful?

17

Do you feel history in general is just useless trivia (memorizing dates of kings and wars)?
Of course not. History is hiSTORY, and it’s filled with fascinating stories that you couldn’t make up. The dates are a part, but you have plenty of characters and plots to fill out a few thousand novels.

Do you think knowledge of your own country’s history is important but other countries/continents are not important?
Only slightly, since it does tell you where things in your country derive. Other than that, all history is fun.

*Do you think history of a certain time period is important (date-of-birth minus 10 years) but anything before that is trivia?
*
All time periods are important, but I find some more interesting than others. Better stories, primarily.

Do you feel “those who don’t learn history are doomed to repeat it” is just an empty platitude regurgitated by history teachers?
It’s true enough, as long as you remember its converse: “those who assume history repeats itself are doomed to make even greater mistakes.”

If you had children, do you think it would be more productive for society if they were given the option to substitute history classes for other subjects such as math or English?
Why substitute? You can learn both!

18

The dates of kings and wars is trivia. The reasons this man became a king and went to war is history. The same reasons might make a man a president and it may be a “peacekeeping action” this time around. Knowing enough of history to grasp the general shape of the world is important.

I once read a low-level highschool English book more-or-less cover-to-cover because the exercises were little snippets of history and biography.

I also remember reading War and Peace and taking a European History class. Both of them reached the Battle of Austerlitz at approximately the same time. It is one of the few events from that class that I remember apprehending as something that really happened.

19

Interesting-- I love reading history, but I don’t really think it’s important for an understanding of the way things are. Like some others have said, I like the stories, (which could be why I like ancient and medieval history better than more recent history).

Also: my dream would be to have the money to be able to get a doctorate in something like medieval or Renaissance history (and, unfortunately, a Master’s as well, because even though I’ll have a MBA in about a year, it doesn’t seem like that counts as much of a prerequisite), because I love researching old manuscripts from that period of time (like Warburg Institute-type studies). But I don’t really feel like it would be important or necessary work, just something that I could focus all my attention on and really get to be an expert at.

Drawing from that: no I don’t think personal or my own country’s history would be more important than some others’.

20

I think that history as taught when I was in high school (in the 1970s) was pretty useless to me. Very little of it stuck, because there was no connection to NOW.

As an example, we learned all about Lewis & Clark and their expedition from the Atlantic to the Pacific: dates, routes, companions, etc. It wasn’t until 20 years later that I found out Alex Mackenzie did it ten years earlier. His route was through Canada, so the U.S. schools didn’t care. And they didn’t tell us why Lewis & Clark’s expedition was important. They didn’t talk about things like the botanical specimens (over 200, carefully-preserved and still available for viewing today), or the mapping techniques.

There’s no date cutoff when things become unimportant. People are still killing each other over events of a millennium ago and more. There is, obviously, a bias toward what effects us the most day-to-day. Slavery was over a long time ago, but you won’t understand race relations in the U.S. unless you know something about it. The Mormons disavowed polygamy long ago, but it still colors people’s perceptions of them.