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A degree in History is usually associated with leftist/socialist/communist thinking in South America, usually due to indoctrination from professors. Is it the s

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?

programLyrique 10y ago
No,in France, some universities/academic departments are said to be leftwing and other rightwing (in history, for instance) but they don't seem to indoctrinate, rather to attract some students who already have the same mindset. 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.
thescribe 10y ago
In my experience yes. Any time someone holds up a major and uses terms like 'critical thinking' or 'widens horizons' and they're not talking about a logic class they really mean hard left indoctrination.
- gmarx 10y ago
  Ha. Yeah, it's amazing how often people use this phrase when they mean "I find it illogical that people disagree with my politics". Actual critical thinking, a skeptical examination of assertions and data, tends to be called something else.
- ghayes 10y ago
  Wait, are you being serious? Can you explain that.. very broad statement?
  - thescribe 10y ago
    So my experience is anecdote not data, but by the end of my time going to college any time a professor said "This class might be about <subject> but it is really about critical thinking" or "The point of education is to widen your horizons" the class was just chalked full of the same unchallenged, easily repeatable Marxist or hard left ideas.
    - coliveira 10y ago
      What do you mean by unchallenged? Marxist ideas are challenged every day, almost everywhere you go. Now, even if they are wrong (I am not going to enter into this discussion), studying them would increase your critical thinking abilities in trying to disprove them. So, the professor was right all along!
      - throwawaysocks 10y ago
        That largely depends on the depth of the engagement. 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...
        coliveira 10y ago
        I don't see any problem with passionate lectures about worker's rights movement. In college I also heard passionate lectures about the marvel of free markets, and had to endure them. Different professors have different persuasions and that is all right, they're not trying to fool anyone. It is up to each one to form his or her personal views of the world, and use the information they get from history and philosophy to enlarge these views.
      - AnimalMuppet 10y ago
        By "unchallenged", I presume thescribe means that the professor gave only the pro-Marx side of the story, and gave it as if it were The Truth. They called it critical thinking, but it was really just propaganda.
        coliveira 10y ago
        I understood exactly what he said. But any college student knows fully well that there's nothing that is The Truth in a class, after all this is not a church. I believe that if the professor presented only the pro-Marx side of the story this is just fine, after all, this is America, everyone knows the other side of the story. 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.
- cortesoft 10y ago
  I don't think my Philosophy degree was hard left indoctrination.... and not all of my philosophy classes were logic class.
  - thescribe 10y ago
    That's fair I was far too broad.
- wutbrodo 10y ago
  It's not clear from your comment whether you're assuming history is like this because of your experience with other majors or whether you have experience with history in particular being like this. 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.
  - thescribe 10y ago
    Sorry, I think my statement appeared a little too broadly. 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.
wutbrodo 10y ago
There are academic departments that have that reputation in the US, but history (after high school) by and large doesn't have the reputation for being ideologically skewed.
coliveira 10y ago
Saying that history professors do leftist indoctrination is a ridiculous statement, is just like saying that astrophysics professors are doing "anti-bible indoctrination". You can study history and support right-wing positions, as many have done in the past. 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.
- sverige 10y ago
  >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 true in the sense of what the study of history has unfortunately become in recent decades at universities, but untrue in the sense of what the study of history has meant and been over the centuries. 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.
  - coliveira 10y ago
    > but untrue in the sense of what the study of history has meant and been over the centuries 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.
ACow_Adonis 10y ago
I'm in the awkward position of wanting to strongly agree and disagree with you at the same time. I did two degrees here: economics and arts(philosophy and religious studies...as in history and anthropology, not theology)...which I think made me one of about three people in the entire university bridging the left/right subject divide. 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...

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?

programLyrique 10y ago

No,in France, some universities/academic departments are said to be leftwing and other rightwing (in history, for instance) but they don't seem to indoctrinate, rather to attract some students who already have the same mindset. 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.

thescribe 10y ago

In my experience yes. Any time someone holds up a major and uses terms like 'critical thinking' or 'widens horizons' and they're not talking about a logic class they really mean hard left indoctrination.

gmarx 10y ago
Ha. Yeah, it's amazing how often people use this phrase when they mean "I find it illogical that people disagree with my politics". Actual critical thinking, a skeptical examination of assertions and data, tends to be called something else.
ghayes 10y ago
Wait, are you being serious? Can you explain that.. very broad statement?
- thescribe 10y ago
  So my experience is anecdote not data, but by the end of my time going to college any time a professor said "This class might be about <subject> but it is really about critical thinking" or "The point of education is to widen your horizons" the class was just chalked full of the same unchallenged, easily repeatable Marxist or hard left ideas.
  - coliveira 10y ago
    What do you mean by unchallenged? Marxist ideas are challenged every day, almost everywhere you go. Now, even if they are wrong (I am not going to enter into this discussion), studying them would increase your critical thinking abilities in trying to disprove them. So, the professor was right all along!
    - throwawaysocks 10y ago
      That largely depends on the depth of the engagement. 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...
      - coliveira 10y ago
        I don't see any problem with passionate lectures about worker's rights movement. In college I also heard passionate lectures about the marvel of free markets, and had to endure them. Different professors have different persuasions and that is all right, they're not trying to fool anyone. It is up to each one to form his or her personal views of the world, and use the information they get from history and philosophy to enlarge these views.
    - AnimalMuppet 10y ago
      By "unchallenged", I presume thescribe means that the professor gave only the pro-Marx side of the story, and gave it as if it were The Truth. They called it critical thinking, but it was really just propaganda.
      - coliveira 10y ago
        I understood exactly what he said. But any college student knows fully well that there's nothing that is The Truth in a class, after all this is not a church. I believe that if the professor presented only the pro-Marx side of the story this is just fine, after all, this is America, everyone knows the other side of the story. 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.
cortesoft 10y ago
I don't think my Philosophy degree was hard left indoctrination.... and not all of my philosophy classes were logic class.
- thescribe 10y ago
  That's fair I was far too broad.
wutbrodo 10y ago
It's not clear from your comment whether you're assuming history is like this because of your experience with other majors or whether you have experience with history in particular being like this. 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.
- thescribe 10y ago
  Sorry, I think my statement appeared a little too broadly. 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.

wutbrodo 10y ago

There are academic departments that have that reputation in the US, but history (after high school) by and large doesn't have the reputation for being ideologically skewed.

coliveira 10y ago

Saying that history professors do leftist indoctrination is a ridiculous statement, is just like saying that astrophysics professors are doing "anti-bible indoctrination". You can study history and support right-wing positions, as many have done in the past. 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.

sverige 10y ago
>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 true in the sense of what the study of history has unfortunately become in recent decades at universities, but untrue in the sense of what the study of history has meant and been over the centuries. 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.
- coliveira 10y ago
  > but untrue in the sense of what the study of history has meant and been over the centuries 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.

ACow_Adonis 10y ago

I'm in the awkward position of wanting to strongly agree and disagree with you at the same time. I did two degrees here: economics and arts(philosophy and religious studies...as in history and anthropology, not theology)...which I think made me one of about three people in the entire university bridging the left/right subject divide. 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...