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0 pointssobriquet91y ago0 comments

History is not abstract. It does not give you generalizations, abstractions and models, just historical facts. Many of those facts are useful in understanding why things around you are the way they are.

The attempts to make history more "scientific", usually for religious or political reasons (e.g., explaining past events throgh class struggle), end up looking like propaganda.

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cout1y ago

If you learned history as a set of facts then you did not learn history. History is about the connections between those facts and the overarching story.

Science is also taught as a set of facts to be memorized, but that is also not science. In both science and history, the most important question is not "what do you know?" but "how do you know?".

sobriquet9OP1y ago

If history was about making the connections, those connections could be used to make predictions that could be tested.

lukan1y ago

You can, but the world is still an chaotic place, so making a forcast on human geopolitics, is like making a weather forecast. Likely valid for the next days, but increasingly bad for longer timeframes.

But one can make for example the prediction that the war in Ukraine will be going on for a little bit longer.

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lukan1y ago

"how do you know?"

And that is exactly the question allmost never being asked in (my) school. "No time for it. Here are the facts. Accept it and learn them, we will determine your future on how well you memorized them"

But to be fair, some of my teachers tried this approach as much as possible, but within the whole framework of the curriculum, not much was possible.

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0 pointssobriquet91y ago0 comments

The attempts to make history more "scientific", usually for religious or political reasons (e.g., explaining past events throgh class struggle), end up looking like propaganda.

0 comments

cout1y ago

If you learned history as a set of facts then you did not learn history. History is about the connections between those facts and the overarching story.

Science is also taught as a set of facts to be memorized, but that is also not science. In both science and history, the most important question is not "what do you know?" but "how do you know?".

sobriquet9OP1y ago

If history was about making the connections, those connections could be used to make predictions that could be tested.

lukan1y ago

But one can make for example the prediction that the war in Ukraine will be going on for a little bit longer.

1 more reply

lukan1y ago

"how do you know?"

And that is exactly the question allmost never being asked in (my) school. "No time for it. Here are the facts. Accept it and learn them, we will determine your future on how well you memorized them"

But to be fair, some of my teachers tried this approach as much as possible, but within the whole framework of the curriculum, not much was possible.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse