A degree in History is usually associated with leftist/socialist/communist thinking in South America, usually due to indoctrination from professors. Is it the same in US/Europe/Asia?
In fact, studying story has no direct connection with leftism. The problem is that right-wing people feel very upset when historians view history outside their traditional models. This is always a big problem for conservatives, because the work of the historian is exactly to discuss new views and interpretations of history. Doing otherwise would be scholastic work, not critical thinking. For this reason, most historical research ends up being an analysis from a point of view that is complementary or even antagonistic to conservatism.
>This is always a big problem for conservatives, because the work of the historian is exactly to discuss new views and interpretations of history. Doing otherwise would be scholastic work, not critical thinking. For this reason, most historical research ends up being an analysis from a point of view that is complementary or even antagonistic to conservatism.
Not to mention the sort of lamely attempted indoctrination I experienced, such as the professor who flatly told us all that we should vote for Gary Hart. It was 1984. The course was on 19th century Russian history. We learnt far more about Lenin's and Stalin's mothers than we did about, oh, say, Russia's territorial ambitions and their reactions to the shifting alliances in Europe at the time.
So, you can say that I'm just a crusty conservative because I had to do a lot of extra reading to get the big picture of what was actually happening in Russia at the time and I found the information the professor shared with us from her thesis to be as interesting as watching paint dry. I'm ok with being labeled if that's what it takes to make the point that not all history done these days is particularly helpful for understanding the things that affected tens of millions of people.
Nobody is under any obligation to do things in the way it was done over the centuries. If you just want history as it was done in the past you can read old history books. Modern historians have a obligation with their own generation. Sometimes they will be more progressive than some people wish, some other times they may be more conservative than others want. Society, being multi-faceted, will frequently disagree, and that is fine.
Reading Das Kapital should be an exercise in critical thinking, regardless of one's political persuasion. For example, where in the software industry is the labor theory of value a reasonable model? Where is it not reasonable? Why? Answering these questions requires what any reasonable person would call critical thinking.
Conversely, hearing a bunch of passionate lectures about worker's rights movements is considerably less enlightening...
That's probably true.
> For the professor to present the arguments anti-Marx in his class would in fact be just the opposite: capitalist indoctrination, where you would be lead to believe that Marx was really wrong and capitalism is the only "correct" system.
Also probably true.
The problem, though, is that the professor is only presenting the Marx side, while claiming to teach critical thinking. That's not critical thinking! Critical thinking means criticizing both sides.
Now, if the professor wanted to teach the Marx side "as a balance to what everybody else says", that's OK too. The problem is the one-side-only combined with the claim of "critical thinking".
I think you probably need to take a few more courses that will help your critical thinking ;)
If it's the latter, can you give some concrete examples? I'm genuinely pretty curious because all my experiences with post-secondary academic history have been unusually non-partisan (compared to many/most other social sciences).
If it's the former...well honestly that's just silly. Just because it's a favorite tactic of the left to claim that anything contrarian is critical thinking doesn't mean the converse is true (i.e. that anything labeled critical thinking is on the hard left).
I find the claim particularly dubious for history: if you really squint and try to label it as partisan, it seems just as likely to me that it would seem right-ish than that it would seem left-ish. The discovery students make in the postsecondary study of history that historiography exists is one of the linchpins of history's alignment with critical thinking: instead of reading sources (and historians) as bearers of incontrovertible truth, you realize that they make up a best-effort account of facts subject to things like lack of information, blind spots, etc. This is fundamentally similar to not blindly trusting academic and scientific authority, a view which dovetails neatly with both the contemporary and historical right[1] (the latter case including opposition to things like high modernism on the left). It's true that a level of distrust of status quo knowledge exists on the left as well (e.g. post-modernism), but that just reinforces my point that it's not fundamentally partisan.
[1] This isn't a commentary on which approach is better, but I hardly think it's controversial that the idea that scientific facts are set hard in stone and you're simply flat wrong if you question them is far more common on the left at the moment than on the right. Skepticism of academia and the scientific establishment consists both of 1) anti-intellectual "scientists are all scammers" and 2) a sober-minded recognition of the limitations of the scientific method and the attendant belief that progress based on scientific knowledge should have some brakes built in.
I'll try to re-state it. In my experience, outside of hard science every one of my professors who was fond the phrase 'critical thinking' was pushing marxism hard, including several history professors I had.
I'm not trying to state that history is hard left overall. Just that if I heard the phrase 'critical thinking' I should prep for a long lecture on worker alienation or class struggle.
My history, anthropology and philosophy classes were consistently professional: empirical, critical, draw from sources, develop thesis, discuss, defend, attack.
Once you moved over into anything connected with contemporary economics/politics, it was a different story, and that goes for both my economics or my political economy/philosophy classes (that's right or left for those that need to translate the euphemisms).
That there's a certain infiltration of "leftism" in some of the Errr...more contemporary/recently invented arts fields, I don't want to argue because I think it's largely true.
But if I'm honest, my economics degree was essentially indoctrination as well: alarmingly ahistorical (those of us who did economic history classes were in the minority), rote memorisation of models, never was the idea of empirically testing or competing our ideas ever floated, and those few of us who actually did read the primary sources or history of the field quickly found that most appeals to such names (Smith, Locke, Ricardo, Keynes, Marx, Say, Malthus, Marshall, blah blah blah) were often mythical figures and misappropriation rather than connected to their actual words, times or contexts.
Look, maybe things have moved on in ten years, but I doubt it, and my uni had a decent reputation for economics at the time...which I'm now thinking is directly tied to their ability to pump out large numbers of unthinking orthodox automatons...
In reality,in History, professors may be slightly engaged politically, and some students as well, but most are rather struggling to figure out what kind of jobs they are going to do after their studies.