- Question
- Is history important?
- Position‹2 of 2
- History is not important
The time spent on studying history could be better used for taking courses which will further students' careers.
The argument
Proponents of this position argue that the case for teaching history rests on an assumption that does not survive examination: that knowing what happened in the past equips a student to act in the present. On this view the content of a history syllabus consists largely of facts and dates, and facts and dates are not skills. A student who can place a treaty or a reign in the right decade has acquired information that will not be called on in any interview, any workplace task, or any decision about how to earn a living. Nor, the argument runs, does knowledge of the past yield reliable knowledge of the future, because the circumstances, technologies and institutions of earlier periods differ so far from present ones that the supposed lessons do not transfer. The second step is a claim about opportunity cost. School time is finite, and every hour given to history is an hour not given to something else. Courses in current social questions, in civics and in economics deal with the institutions and arrangements students will actually encounter as adults: how elections work, how credit and debt work, how a government is held to account. Those subjects bear directly on daily life in a way that an account of a distant period does not, and on this argument they have the stronger claim on the timetable. Taken together, proponents conclude, the discipline fails the test that ought to be applied to anything compulsory. Careers and futures depend on what is here and now, not on what happened a hundred, a thousand, or even 10,000 years ago, and a subject that prepares students for neither can hardly be called important.
Premises
Counter-arguments
There are plenty of careers which benefit from or rely upon evidence from historical records to make decisions or advances in their field. Some of them, such as those relating to the government, law, and economy, are critical to keeping our society in order.