Is history important?

History is just rote memorization of dates and facts

Question: Is history important?
Position‹2 of 2: History is not important
Argument1 of 3›: History is just rote memorization of dates and facts

Students do not retain history lessons because they are bored with memorizing dates and facts which will never be useful in their daily lives.

The argument

The case that history is not important rests less on the past itself than on what is actually transmitted when history is taught. As history is delivered in K-12 schools, it is tedious and boring for most students, and the boredom is not incidental to the subject's content but produced by the form the subject takes in a classroom. What that form consists of is memorisation. Students are required to retain dates and events, which thing happened in which year, in what order and involving whom, and are assessed on whether they have retained them. What they are generally not taught is historical context: why those events followed from the conditions that preceded them, what the people involved were responding to, and how any of it is relevant to today's world. The facts are presented stripped of the connections that would make them intelligible, so they arrive with little or no meaning on their own. The consequence is that what students take away is not understanding but a store of disconnected particulars, and a store of disconnected particulars has no use. A date recalled without any grasp of what made it matter cannot inform a judgement about anything; it can only be reproduced on demand and then forgotten, which is what usually happens to it. Whatever value history might have in principle, what is in fact being delivered under its name does not carry that value to the people receiving it. On this view the defence of history as a subject describes something other than the thing being taught. If history as actually encountered is rote memorisation of dates and facts, and if rote memorisation of dates and facts yields nothing a person can use, then history is not important.

Premises

[P1]History as taught in K-12 schools is tedious and boring for most students. [P2] Rather than teaching historical context and its relevance to today, it forces students to memorize dates and events with little meaning on their own. [C] Therefore, because history is just rote memorization of dates and facts, history is not important.

Counter-arguments

History classes which are "tedious and boring" are taught in an uninspired way. Effective teachers will teach history within the context of how it relates to the present, and will highlight real-world applications for the use of historical knowledge.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] There are plenty of students who do enjoy history class. [Rejecting P2] It depends on the teacher and how they teach the history class.

Proponents cited

Penelope J. Corfield
“Perhaps the critics who complain that History-is-so-boring had the misfortune to be taught by uninspired teachers who dictated 'teacher's notes' or who inculcated the subject as a compendium of data to be learned by heart. Such pedagogic styles are best outlawed, although the information that they intended to convey is far from irrelevant.”
Brenda M. Trofanenko
“I agree that there should be a base knowledge that students need to know about their country and their community affiliations. But its relevance lies not just in knowing historical fact but being able to see what can be gleaned from historical inquiry, including cause and effect, progress and decline, and historical significance. You still have to know what happened, but you also have to be able to put it into a larger context of what was happening at the time, why it was happening, and what relevance it has to the current day.”