1. History's main use is to avoid mistakes people from the past made.

2. Yes, i believe it should. History should also be required for poltiical leaders.

3. Discussion based

4. As said before, it allows a knoweledge of what was tried and failed.

For example. Napeleon attacked Russia. Russia retreated farther and farther back until the French were smashed by winter. If Hitler knew history a bit more, he would've known what happened to Napeleon and not have attacked Russia

if by opinionated and irrational you mean disagree with you while you refuse to formulate an argument, please move on. Plus I have no intention of getting into a pissing match here I am generally interested in hearing opions. I will throw in some counterfactuals and questions to complicate the argument, but I have no intention of arguing.

Trying to run a nation without an excellent knowledge of history would be like trying to learn quantum mechanics without a basic knowledge of algebra.

^ i agree with that completely

"History's main use is to avoid mistakes people from the past made. "

This is a common answer, and one that I don't necessarily agree with. Lets use an example of the major wars of America fought by the U.S

The Western powers "learn" from the horror and pointlessness of WWI by ignoring and enabling Nazi Germany, helping to lead to the Armageddon known now as WWII and the "munich precedent"

In Vietnam the US learns from the munich precedent and becomes embroiled in a futile and pointless war in South East Asian jungles costing lives treasure and international standing.

The US learned from Munich, U.S. leaders sought to confront what they saw as "tyranny" and did so from their history lessons, and the results were disastrous. We could keep on going with Iraq, Afganistan the War on terror etc. but the point of the matter is "learning from the past" does not equal "learning fact" it is basically learning formulated points of views about the past and using the past to justify current actions. It is an argument that history (t can be argued) disproves. I'd be interested in hearing your opinion.

In a secondary school in my city, the history teacher asked the students to write down what happened to them on the way to school that day. The anonymous pieces of paper were collected in a hat. Then the teacher randomly picked one piece of paper and threw all the others in the garbage bin. He raised that single piece of paper and said: "This is official history."

I like this thread. The utility of knowing what had happened back in the day is so obvious to me that I actually have to think really hard to justify it verbally.

Learning history teaches you what people are like and how the world works. It also gives you a sense of where it might be going. That's the utility of history to me, outside of how imaginative and fun it can be.

The main role of history in school is to be the "story" that shapes your perception of who you are. It always supports the myths that are currently fashionable in your cultural and political territory. People with minds of their own spend the rest of their life getting rid of the "story" they heard in school.

with that definition should it be taught in schools which are proxys for the local, state and federal government among other groups?

Santa, that's a strange question. Should there be flags and anthems? It's all part of a country's self-promotion.

I have no arguments for why, but I completely agree that history should be taught in schools. Personally I wish it was more of the research style learning (if that makes sense), i.e. kids are given a topic or area and they have to research and write an essay.

Zmaj meant it in terms of propaganda, but history is important yes for your identity to learn you place in the world and tell yourself a story of your origins. Just as memory of your own life is important for this same story-telling.

I however still stand by my defense of history rooted in its ability to help you predict where things are going.

History is also important to understand other cultures.

We study history for the same reason we study the other sciences. Knowledge is a tool with which we may shape the world to our benefit. History, however is complex (like psychology and economics), and it doesn't have simple laws the way physics does that can be used it to make predictions that are totally reliable. In Physics we can look a purported perpetual motion machine and know that it can't possibly work. By comparison we can't look at history and say that we know for a fact that an invasion of Russia in winter must fail. But we can look at history and gleam some of the *likely* reasons that previous invasions of Russia have failed and use that information to help us make an informed decision. For example, we make sure that our army packs plenty of thermal underwear, or alternatively we could call of the invasion altogether, or take a different approach - nuclear weapons perhaps?

From someone claiming to be avoiding a thread because someone is unpleasent it seems Zmaj is quite willing to pick a fight.

How is that a strange question? if history is merely big brothers way of getting us to do what he wants, should it be taught in the public sphere at all or should it be completely privatized, I think that is a more than legitimate question.

"
I however still stand by my defense of history rooted in its ability to help you predict where things are going."

But do you actually think history has truely predicted where things are going? Does history really have any predictable power when that prophesy isn't written into history after the fact?

"
I however still stand by my defense of history rooted in its ability to help you predict where things are going."

History, however, is not a science, and historians gave up on trying to characterize it so a while ago. This is because of some off the the reasons you cited above. And while it is true we can learn from history isn't it true that history can also blind us from the correct course of action as well, right? It all depends not on the historical action but whether that historical lesson is confirmed by later events.

"History, however, is not a science"

Another interesting question is what is science? What is the natural sciences have that distinguish them from the social sciences? Personally I think history is a science, but my definition of science is pretty broad - systematic acquisition and organization of knowledge.
I think science lies on a continuum, with physics and chemistry is at one end and economics, psychology and history at the other, and biology lying in-between (some of biology is part history - paleontology for example) The core difference is the levels of complexity involved. The social sciences are far more complex than the natural sciences.

just to give a background spyman, in the twentieth century and especially in the post-war era, many historians tried to pull the discipline of history toward "sciences" like political science and sociology. Some still do, but now the vast majority of historians have conceded that their discipline is not a science and in fact belongs to the arts and humanities sphere of knowledge.

Economics, psychology and history, for the most part rely on empirical fact and use scientific methods looking for trends and rules in data. A historian for the most part does not. A historian and a history teacher fomulates a story and an argument from events but for the most part does not approach this process scientifically and nearly never follows a scientific process. For these and other reasons it is not currently seen as a science, even though such a designation would add prestige to the field. I hope that helped

*Economic psychology and sociology I meant to say

"History's main use is to avoid mistakes people from the past made."

I knew this was a bullshit explanation for the study of history when my undergrad college tried to sell me on it and it hasn't gained any value since then. If this was true, historians would be the liberal arts equivalent of meteorologists, predicting future events based on current ones. History is most definitely a liberal art, about as far from a "science" as one can get without venturing into the utterly useless fields of English and Philosophy.

"Another interesting question is what is science?"

Your definition of 'science' is strange at best, a bastardization of the word at worst. History is not a science in that its theories and studies are not subject to the scientific method and experimentation. In fields that transcend the boundary between liberal art and science, such as economics, psychology, and sociology, experiments can be conducted, evidence gathered, predictions made. This is not possible with history. It is merely the gathering, interpreting, and re-interpreting of information related to past events. I see little value in its study other than one of personal interest.

I'm sad that your undergraduate school tried to sell you on the fact that history is studied to avoid past mistakes. Its usually an undergraduate institution's role to dispel that myth.

"If history is merely big brothers way of getting us to do what he wants, should it be taught in the public sphere at all or should it be completely privatized, I think that is a more than legitimate question."

It is not. Big Brother is not some foreign evil entity, but the society itself. Asking "should history be taught in the the public sphere" is futile. It's like asking "should there be money", or "should we have borders". If you want to talk about idealistic ideas, you can, of course, but it's a waste of time.

History is a form of letting you know how much bullshit you can get away with before someone stops you :)

Zmaj, what a prize. Actually Zmaj this debate IS going on right now in many parts of the country on the government, school board and higher educational level. There is real talk of sacrificing history in favor of math and science and other studies. So I ask again, should your tax dollars go toward society forcing its values on children (your view).

The debate is going on. What else is new?

As for my view, I'm an elitist. I don't give a damn about what the people in general is forced to learn and pay for additional private education for my children. It would be entirely private if I had the means.

"The debate is going on. What else is new?"

I assumed a futile discussion about "idealist ideals" would assume that these ideas aren't on the verge of leading to policy changes, but what do i know.

On the verge of policy changes? If you want to convince me, you'll have to provide more than your word for it.

Santa, I agree with you completely.
Can you please be more specific in your second question? I can only answer "Before asking if history should be taught, we should ask ourself what we want to accomplish while teaching something", then realizing if history meets the requisite to be needed.
My opinion is that school should not form "culture" but lay its foundations, meaning "foundations for a free mind". If you agree with that, history can teach one of the thousand ways to think about a fact, in the perspective of cause/effect, starting in a small scale and going concentrically to larger scales, being able to reason in multi levels. I repeat: founding minds, not notions: well yeah, it's fundamental.

History isn't scientifical, but it has its purposes in analyzing the past events because, by interpretating it, we can try to predict (with mere casuality) future exploits before actually starting a new event/course. Applying it to sociology, antropology, etc, its uses are immense.
Example: today it's clear that leaving a broken Germany at the end of WWI posed an ideal ground for revenge feelings, and that a ruined economy led to desperation and prepared the field for populists of a certain kind (people that would have never found a national audience with their ideas in a normal situation) leading to WWII. Well, someone foresaw a similar situation during these months in Greece, with the crisis, and now look at the astonishing result achieved by neonazis there.

THIS history I'd like to find in schools. Links between different areas of humanities. Way of thinking, not thoughts themselves. History is not cronology. Its purpose is not to tell us that there was a revolution in France in the late XVIII century, but to make us ask why it happened and why it ended that way.

I can understand (and accept) that history is not a science in the same way physics is a science. I can also see that there is an elements of history which borders on art - history can be quite subjective whereas science is supposed to be entirely objective. Yet I can't help but feel that there are core elements in common.

Take these two statements:

1. Modern humans evolved in Africa.
2. The Goths originally came from Scandinavia.

Both are supposedly objective facts (which had to be discovered), even if there is still room for debate. Both may use tools which are part of the scientific method (in the former fossils may be examined, in the latter artifacts). The first is scientific (most would agree on that). Why is the second statement less scientific?

BreathOfVega, you can't predict anything. But your example with Germany and Greece would still be useful to help children see how an event could be interpreted, with the emphasis on "could".