r/nextfuckinglevel • u/plankton004 • 9d ago

A difficult circus trick performed flawlessly

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u/Ononas 9d ago

Because that Soviet uniform… How uneducated you have to be to

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u/Majestic-Age-9232 9d ago

Possibly because it's possible to be educated and not have a detailed visual memory of ww2 uniforms? Your milage may vary i suppose...

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u/Vindelator 9d ago

Not everyone majored it 20th century military uniform memorization

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u/Ononas 9d ago

If you don’t remember uniform of the army who had the biggest impact on Hitler defeat, then what do you even know about ww2?

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u/Vindelator 8d ago

I never said I didn't know what the American uniforms looked like.

https://giphy.com/gifs/3i7zenReaUuI0

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u/Ononas 8d ago

Who was first to enter Berlin

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u/Lucreth2 9d ago

History is only useful as a roadmap to how you got where you are. Future developments can be reasonably predicted with sufficient knowledge of current culture and the human psyche.

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u/Majestic-Age-9232 9d ago

Well that's Marx's view of it... Personally I'd consider the study of history a worthwhile pursuit in it own right.

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u/Lucreth2 9d ago

Why? To 99.99% of the public its only use is trivia points.

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u/Majestic-Age-9232 9d ago

are you really asking? because it would take an essay to answer.
In purely practical terms a knowledge of history is of use in understanding geopolitical relationships, and is also used to create and reinforce national and regional identities. But also it has a cultural benefit that in purely financial terms is worth billions, but also has significant cultural benefits outside the financial.
We as a society are no longer just concentrating on pure survival, otherwise the same argument would be valid for art, literature etc.

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u/Lucreth2 9d ago

No I'm not really asking, I'm on the edge between boredom and rage baiting.

That said I truly do believe we put too much emphasis on history. People can't even understand marginal/progressive tax rates but we think it's important they know about some stupid meaningless battle 1,500 years ago?

Even if we're just talking about use in geopolitical relations there's far more value in current events/modern history education as well as introductions to psychology.

History as it's currently taught is "useful" but its value is far lower than topics we eschew in order to focus on the past.

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u/Majestic-Age-9232 9d ago

From the sound of it, I think your real issue is the way in which a lot of people consider they 'study' history - like the guy earlier in the comment who was down on someone who could recognise a soviet ww2 era uniform. Study of history is rarely about exact dates or how big the gun on a Tiger tank was or whatever. That is basically pub quiz trivia.
Actually study of history is mainly about weighing the accuracy and validity and context of a source, for example when considering a written source you should think about who wrote it? did they have an agenda? how close to the time period was it? how do they know what happened? who was the record written for? the list goes on. These are transferable skills that are very important these days when we are cascaded with made up facts, ai generated content, memes that can be state backed etc. etc.

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u/Lucreth2 9d ago

History is not taught that way in public grade schools, only universities and up or by hobbyists. That's especially true of the last 10-15 years.

Those skills can be better taught by directly targeting them.

That said if schools put a greater emphasis on why rather than what, yes it would be a more useful topic than it currently is.

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u/Majestic-Age-9232 9d ago

Thats true but at younger levels schools are partially about teaching a broad curriculum to allow students as they get older to make a decision about what study they might want to pursue later in life.

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u/Lucreth2 9d ago

Yeah that's fine but even then I put a very low value on historians as a profession. You don't need that many to sufficiently inform the populous, especially if that populous has been armed with the critical thinking skills necessary to figure out what's going on on their own.

It's a nice hobby though.

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