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Comment by mattlondon | Hacker News Reader

Meh - I don't know. At least in the UK, "History" classes at school were less about memorising the facts, and more about questioning the who, what, why of some source of information.

One thing that stands out in my memory is multiple different teachers always drilling into us: "never trust photos" (you don't always know who took them, for what reason, and if they were real or staged or whatever)

If 12 year old kids are being taught this, I don't think future historians will be fooled by a pretty photo. It is not like people have been unable to generate imagery of non-true stuff before - CGI in films (and also games for that matter) have been pretty close to 100% realistic for some time ... no one is complaining that future historians are going to confuse the scenes from The Matrix about what really happened in the 1990s. The barrier to entry is lower now of course, but I don't think that changes the position: you cant trust a photo.

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Your history classes sound a lot more useful than the ones I sat through in the US - ours was mostly delivered as a set of settled fact.

There is a local school that is dedicating 90 minutes to math and 90 minutes to english. Splitting science and history to a mere 45 minutes each.

I completely support this. Science prior to college was basically a waste. History was full of bias and axes to grind.

Don't get me wrong, teach these subjects, the scientific method is great. However, the value is low compared to the tools given in Math and English.

What tools are you given in English? And how many of the tools in Maths are you still using?

Like, I’m very happy that I got to learn probability theory, but all the differential equations that broke my mind seem entirely pointless now.

This might feel less useful for CS, but for other sciences and even engineering (mechanical, aero, materials, chem, electrical, marine) you need differential eq.

And than natural sciences in general (climate, space) also have applications there.

Subjects that feel useful post graduation, if they are being taught in high school early college the time gap makes it less useful. HS and early college classes fundamentals are needed for the specialized curriculum that needed for higher college and post graduate education.

I don't know how you could expect anyone to really understand literature without history. Imagine trying to explain Animal Farm without Stalin.

In schools where they don't teach History, Literature teachers spend a lot of time teaching History, so that they can teach Literature meaningfully.

> Science prior to college was basically a waste.

My public school biology class involved sequencing and editing DNA to make bacteria change color.

I would not call it a waste.

In fact I wish I would've had more science in school, I managed to go until college until I took my first Physics class, and physics is really useful.

I had a couple of brilliant history teachers during elementary. Both were massive drunks

We never "learnt" any facts (like who was king/queen/PM/president or whatever) - usually you'd study one very narrow period for an entire year.

So one year you'd learn about the Roman empire's withdrawal from Britain, the next it was the Russian revolution, the year after it was the Wars of the Roses or whatever.

Exam questions were always always always in the form of "The Roman withdrawal from Britain was inevitable. Discuss" or "The Industrial revolution led to the fall of the British Empire. Discuss". I.e. long-form essay answers, perhaps 2 or 3 essays within a single 2 or 3 hour exam. You never had to just recall naked facts on their own - you needed to know some to answer the essays of course, but you never just recited.

So pros and cons - I have no idea about what order the Prime Ministers were in or Kings and Queens or if the Edwardian Era came before or after the victorian era etc. I lack historic knowledge, but I guess the skills learnt were useful?

I have no idea what it is like now - my experience is a couple of decades out of date.

edit: looks like things are more or less the same still. Example paper with questions specifically asking you to critique historic sources (page 3): https://cdn.savemyexams.co.uk/uploads/2023/01/1hia-11-que-20.... Moar: https://www.savemyexams.co.uk/gcse/history/edexcel/-/pages/p...

You know, it's been a long time, but even growing up in Orlando Florida, I felt like a lot of my history was about "why" more than anything else. Maybe it's just because I had multiple history classes in a row taught by retired lawyers, but I actually felt like I got a fairly interesting perspective of history.

Funny, almost all of my best teachers seemed to be retired from something else.

There's probably a selection bias towards people who "do things because they feel like it" and "do things for the paycheck".

If you're a retired lawyer, it's likely that you're teaching just keep yourself entertained, or maybe just some supplemental income [1]. When you do things for fun, instead of out of necessity, it gives you the distinct advantage of allowing yourself to focus only on things that are actually interesting to you.

It's possible that my high school history teachers started teaching history specifically because they felt like they might have a unique take on it.

[1] I know that teachers are traditionally underpaid; however if it's just supplemental income, "underpaid" is still often better than "zero income". $36,000 a year isn't a ton of money, but if you're already largely retired, it might be the difference between "taking a trip this summer" or not.

Variance on this is very high. Where your classes landed on the memorize-think axis will swing wildly from district to district, and even possibly from teacher to teacher within the same school.

Yeah, definitely. A couple of my later teachers edged slightly into think territory, but I don't remember the textbooks structurally encouraging this, so memorization was the easy path. Which is a shame - since rediscovering history through podcasts that discuss this stuff in depth, I realized that I actually love history - it's kind of the study of how big groups of people act and interact with systems, which is super fascinating, and super relevant to engineering, finance, civics, politics, and life in general. I just wish I'd realized that earlier, and not wasted so much time in school absorbing a useless dehydrated version.

That was how history was taught before Michael Gove came along and decided history was really about chronology, at least..

Agree that we've had plenty of ability to fake photos and documents before. I mean, some of the most famous historical photos of the Soviet Union are famous because of who was removed from them!

What school did you go to??? History classes were all about learning dates and being able to recite or write the True History of the Righteous British Empire.

Yeah, the ”post-truth era” is a weird catchphrase which has been going strong for the last 5 years or so at minimum, yet the described dystopia has never arrived and never has been on track to arrive.

You must have had the privilege to attend a very good school, possibly private.

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