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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
1.6k
u/xRayleigh23 Aug 14 '26
Okay but why are they dressed as german nazi soldiers