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The Decline of Historical Thinking

• whistlerbrk 8y ago
  Seems like a nice potential solution would be promoting dual majors in journalism and history so journalists could provide deep historical context for the events they report on
  • yyyymmddhhmmss 8y ago
    That would be very problematic for selling ads, though.
    • Ma8ee 8y ago
      This is one reason why some of us choose to pay for journalism.
      • cies 8y ago
        I paid and still saw ads, "advertorials" (disgusting), and verbatim copies of press releases + PR firm handouts. So I stopped paying. If someone can point me to proper news sites that give me quality paid news, please do so.
        • ggm 8y ago
          You won't like my answer. I pay for the guardian. It's proper news. I would pay for the Australian but I refuse to pay Murdoch press. I would strongly consider paying for the washpo or the economist.
          • Chris2048 8y ago
            How do you know it's "proper news"?
            • ggm 8y ago
              How does anyone know its proper news? Contextually I think it means from a newspaper which employs trained journalists and with an established editorial policy you can find on the web. Agreeing with it isn't the point btw.
          • cies 8y ago
            Why should I not like your answer? I like a lot from the Guardian, it was on my list actually. Thanks for your suggestion.
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  • cm2187 8y ago
    High school should provide enough general culture in history to enable people to have basic notions and make history books accessible should people want to learn more about a specific period. I don’t think a college degree in history should be required for that.
    • nerdponx 8y ago
      Indeed. I suspect a part of the reason for the rise of college education as a necessity is the failure of public education to actually educate. I went to a pretty good high school, and I feel like I learned a lot, but I still feel like we could have learned more, and learned it better I went to a pretty good high school, and I feel like I've learned a lot, but I still feel like we could have learned more, and learned it better.
    • hopler 8y ago
      You believe that liberal arts college professors offer nothing of value?
      • AnimalMuppet 8y ago
        You believe that putting words in peoples' mouths is a good way to conduct a conversation?
  • idoubtit 8y ago
    Journalists often have at least two objectives: conveying information and attracting an audience (which might be directly related to selling ads). Providing a deep historical context does help with the quality of information, but it won't attract a large audience. The reality is even worse: it costs more to produce deep reports, but many viewers/readers will avoid those, and ads are harder to sell on historical subjects. Most Americans now use social networks as their main source of information, with TV on second place, so I doubt this show an appetite for a better quality of information.
    • nerdponx 8y ago
      That's why a having a degree in something, where you have the knowledge relatively close at hand, is valuable. It can turn a deep report into a routine article.
  • matt4077 8y ago
    It’s rather common for journalists not to have a degree specific to journalism. Many have a liberal arts degree, which focuses heavily on history and philosophy. But there’s also a significant number of lawyers, business majors, or even MDs.
  • adjwilli 8y ago
    FWIW, AP everyday publishes "Today in History" (https://www.apnews.com/c543085359964ecb9ad6f6a9da21c3d0 https://www.apnews.com/c543085359964ecb9ad6f6a9da21c3d0) and even makes a video for syndication.
• RcouF1uZ4gsC 8y ago
  One of the nice things about the age we live in is that you don't need to go to college to get a good understanding of history. I have been listening to the Great Courses history lectures on Audible: https://www.audible.com/ep/the-great-courses-history https://www.audible.com/ep/the-great-courses-history while commuting. I have learned so much. Learning history helps give a new perspective on current events.
• jeromebaek 8y ago
  Or, perhaps, the reason for the decline of history is because it is written by the "winners", and has, for the most part, failed to shed outdated, colonial modes of thought. History is progressing very fast, exponentially faster than it ever has. Do the old, tenured professors of today have what it takes to see this progress and give up their outdated modes of thinking? The fact that philosophy is not seeing a similar decline (http://dailynous.com/2018/11/30/sharp-decline-philosophy-majors-hit-bottom-guest-post-eric-schwitzgebel/ http://dailynous.com/2018/11/30/sharp-decline-philosophy-maj...) should be reason enough to believe that people today, even less privileged ones, desire to know who and where they are. Not that philosophy is unaffected by outdated modes of thought - but its raison d'etre is to lay bare those modes, which allow students to engage with the modes themselves, rather than the misguided content (bad history) generated by misguided modes.
  • bobthechef 8y ago
    I don't know if the decline is because people think it's a bunk rationalization of power, though I can see how some people might reason that way and lose interest. Frankly, I'm not convinced by that. I don't think most people think of history that way. Most people would probably accept whatever historical claims at face value without any reason for suspicion. You've have to make the case that the people who would have gone into history are now suddenly woke and see history as a collection of suffocating lies. A much simpler explanation is that history doesn't get you a job that pays well, at least not in any obvious way that translates from major to job. And universities have been emphasizing the marketability of majors for a few decades now. So if there's a decline, it must reflect broader trends.
    • sonnyblarney 8y ago
      Especially as Uni becomes more expensive, the economic rationale of 'job' hit even harder. That said ... we should also consider that most subjects don't apply very directly anyhow. I'll bet someone with a History major does just as well in Communications that someone with a Communications major.
  • WalterBright 8y ago
• kijin 8y ago
  The decline of history departments in universities is not the same as the decline of "hitorical thinking", though the two phenomena might or might have a common cause. One can have a keen appreciation of history without ever having set foot in a history class in university. If this weren't possible, historical thinking would be doomed anyway. If historians really care about historical thinking as an ability, they should stop complaining about the size of their departments and actually go out and find a way to encourage the general public to take an interest in history, not just the small subset who choose history as a major. Ditto for literature, philosophy, and most of the rest of the humanities. These are things that every educated person should be familiar with. Disclaimer: I haz a Ph.D. in the humanities. I don't work in academia.
  • jacobolus 8y ago
    > they should stop complaining about the size of their departments and actually go out and find a way to encourage the general public Do you have any suggestions? Many historians write popularly-aimed books, make media appearances, give public lectures, .... Academics I know prioritize getting their own work done above starting new public outreach projects or the like, and already feel stressed about not getting enough time to do their work in the face of many competing draws on their finite attention including teaching, administrative nonsense, their own families, ... > One can have a keen appreciation of history without ever having set foot in a history class in university. One cannot develop the thinking style / methods of inquiry of working historians without actually doing years of relevant work and getting lots of feedback, which is possible but frankly extremely rare and difficult outside of universities. Historians, ethnographers, critics, journalists, philosophers, statisticians, corporate managers, diplomats, intelligence analysts, prosecutors, ... have different approaches to problems and dramatically different perspectives. Just reading a handful of books doesn’t really manage to train a student in a whole system of thinking. Even getting the barest appreciation for what those ways of thinking are about, how they differ, why they are valuable, etc. takes significant engagement from students. At least up through high school students have very little engagement with real scholastic or professional working styles or methods of inquiry. Secondary schools focus almost entirely on “content”, meaning more or less trivia, and most of the general public thinks that e.g. the job of a historian is to discover more precise lists of facts about the past.
• sitkack 8y ago
  As we see STEM rise, if we look deep enough, the promotion of STEM also pushes down everything else not stem, recess, physical education, art, history, the very things that make us human(e). STEM is a hit on the humanities, learning those is now the domain of the 1%. Forced STEM is a way to train the next generation of wage slaves. It is votec starting at the earliest possible age while being couched in a faux constructionist _.
  • est31 8y ago
    If the job prospects of history majors are teacher and cab driver, then it's not very attractive to many people for good reason. History is important, historians are important, but not everyone needs to study it. The skills only have limited demands on the job market and its dangerous to tell people to study history if they have meek prospects, especially in a place like the US where colleges aren't tuition free.
    • harimau777 8y ago
      I realize that this is likely what you intended to communicate, but I would differentiate between the need to study a subject and the need to specialize in it as a career path. I agree that not everyone needs to become a historian but I think that everyone needs to study history.
  • skybrian 8y ago
    Using "wage slave" unironically for cushy office jobs betrays a pretty severe lack of empathy and historical perspective.
    • therealx 8y ago
      They're cushy office jobs now because the market isn't over flooded with talent.
  • baybal2 8y ago
    > Forced STEM is a way to train the next generation of wage slaves. And at the same time, it is the only way the West can compete with China
• drieddust 8y ago
  > The Yale history department intends to hire more than a half-dozen faculty members this year alone. Meanwhile, the chancellor of the University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point, Bernie L. Patterson, recently proposed that the school’s history major be eliminated, and that at least one member of its tenured faculty be dismissed. How do they expect to hire and fire faculty members at whim. This can't be done without compromising the quality which means level of education will be going down further and student attrition will increase as a result. I do not think these skills are build in a day or retained if one is fired from the job and end up flips burgers. This idea of talent available on standby seems pretty funny to me.
• neokantian 8y ago
  Is the purpose of acquiring a higher-education degree to enable its holder to make more money than without? This question is especially relevant when lots of graduates are supposed to pay back hefty student loans. If a graduate wishes to achieve other goals than merely acquiring job skills, who says that such alternative teachings are not just the one or the other form of culturally-Marxist indoctrination? I am convinced that the historical method is an epistemologically sound knowledge approach. However, that is not how I remember history classes in high school, which as expected, amounted to promoting the official, blue-pilled narrative. High-school history classes were not an exercise in the historical method. Who says that history in higher-education classes are? The academia ask for a lot of time and a lot of money. Why would they be exempt from accountability? Prospective students had better ask more hard questions instead of fewer, before enrolling.
• koosnel 8y ago
  If money was not part of the equation I would have loved to have studied history.
• firasd 8y ago
  Interesting article. The worst combination is when people lean on the weight of history, but in an uninformed, cargo cult way. I feel like this is done in American discourse regarding World War 2 a lot, as stunningly exemplified in this clip (Chris Matthews vs. Kevin James on Appeasement): https://youtu.be/YK0d8ENS__c?t=240 https://youtu.be/YK0d8ENS__c?t=240
• OliverJones 8y ago
  So, the number of students taking history degrees is declining except in the ruling-class colleges, is it? I was fortunate enough to attend a ruling class college a long time ago. I graduated from a high school where the required history course was simply propaganda. The teacher never asked for the slightest bit of critical thinking. That's 2019 me reflecting on the experience of 1969 me. 1969 me thought it was over-the-top boring. That high school class gave history a bad name. I suspect nothing much has changed. So, why should the UW Stevens Point students waste their time and tuition? They aren't. They are behaving rationally. Knowing how to examine the past--to learn from the dead--is a part of mastering ANY trade. Reading about Alan Turing and John von Neumann makes me a better programmer. Knowing how Jon Postel (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) worked is key to understanding how the Internet became what it is. Do future nurses need to know how existentially frustrating it was for Dr. Ignatz Semmelweis to persuade his fellow surgeons to wash their hands before touching patients? Yes, they do. Do would-be social workers need to know how various religions understood human sexuality a century ago? Only if they want to know how people got to be the way they are. Do marketing people need to know how upstart Pepsi gained market share from Coca-Cola early last century? Yes. Therefore: here's a CALL TO ACTION for History Departments in colleges. Work with other departments to build and teach good history segments in other courses of study. Build it into the content of various classes, don't just teach a required history class. And, if you educate future K12 teachers, help them know history. Stop wringing your hands about fewer history majors. Take a page from the way many English departments teach writing, and build it into other courses.
  • billman 8y ago
    "An aged man is but a paltry thing"
  • yostrovs 8y ago
    A response I'm imagining you'll get from college administrators today: "To truly teach history, we must first begin with those who were not part of it and understand why they were not. Why weren't there any important early black computer scientists? Why were women mostly absent in elucidating the laws of motion? These questions should form the basis of further historical study of physics, surgery, etc."
• svsucculents 8y ago
  Historical consciousness. You have several generations that have no lessons learned. Old is _bad_ : eco unfriendly, white society/culture washed, etc..the revisionists and PC nuts really pulled a rabbit out the hat with their emasculation of history.
• dalbasal 8y ago
  Walter Lippmann warned about a century ago, in his seminal “Liberty and the News.” "Men who have lost their grip upon the relevant facts of their environment are the inevitable victims of agitation and propaganda. The quack, the charlatan, the jingo . . . can flourish only where the audience is deprived of independent access to information" I no longer agree with this, personally. Politics is not a truth-seeking exercise. It's no science, law or even journalism. It's an allegiance & authority forming exercise. Part of that is forming a supporting narrative but this is more an output than an input. Truth may inform or that narrative, but only somewhat, and so do other things. You can almost define a "political issue" as one where identity & allegiance shapes opinions more than fact. Imagine most any conflict. Russians & Ukrainians. Israelis and Palestinians, etc. Most people's political position is dictated by their national identity. No facts will convince most Russian nationalists that Ukraine has a moral right to crimea. When a question is political enough, facts are subservient to opinion. People will engage with facts that support their opinion, not the other way. In fact, even the terms "facts," "opinion," or "truth" are somewhat misleading. The operative concepts in politics are "identity," "allegiance" and feelings. (1)identity in this sense: http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html
  • nerdponx 8y ago
    This state of things is not an accident. It is precisely the result of information asymmetry between voters and politicians. When you have no information, you must go on other sources. If you grow up lacking information, used to acting on feeling, you don't know how to process information and tend to reject i when you have no information, you must go on other sources. If you spend your life lacking information, used to acting on feeling, you don't know how to process information and tend to reject it. Or you have been convinced that you are knowledgeable and informed, by people interested in keeping you uninformed. Politicians benefit when politics works this way. They always have and will continue to do so. And now that we have a news media, they are complicit. No facts will convince most Russian nationalists that Ukraine has a moral right to crimea Maybe so, but when powerful interests benefit from such a state of affairs, it's almost illogical to assume that said interests had no hand in crafting it.
• dade_ 8y ago
  No book on the subject is perfect, but I recommend this book: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/555926.The_New_Penguin_History_of_The_World https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/555926.The_New_Penguin_H... Approachable by anyone, readable, and doesn't have an ending until we really screw things up.
  • kiliantics 8y ago
    A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn would be a good one to get the historical context for politics today. A People's History of the World is similar for a more global view.
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
• RoutinePlayer 8y ago
  Folks here are acutely aware of needing to support their tech claims or arguments with evidence, but seems like when it comes to other domains of human understanding those requirements go out the window. The responses here seem to be making Eric Alterman's point in that article, that people who seem to have the resources to better understand ourselves aren't doing it correctly, or keep shifting the discussion with specious arguments. All political thoughts are based on certain assumptions about human nature, and the best (most prudent) assumptions we have about our human nature start with evolutionary psychologists, and other who study how our brains have evolved.
• vaughnegut 8y ago
  This is a topic close to my heart, since I went to university for history (I'm now doing a second Bachelor's in Comp Sci). A theme I've noticed in the comments, and in the public at large, is confusing learning history with learning to be an historian (or historical thinking). During my degree, I obviously learned a great deal of history. However, a large portion of my time was spent on context-building, and attempting to understand sources on their own terms and to contextualize them into the broader world around them. For example, to study the famous historic period foo, you must first learn something of the period before it, bar. It's also important to understand its society and culture, as well as those of a place's neighbours (you can't learn English History without learning some French history). It felt less like a degree in "history", and closer to a degree in context-building. This, in my mind, was the greatest value of it, as it wormed its way into my brain informs how I view new topics and ideas. It's something I've noticed is absent for many smart people when they talk about history specifically (although they may be excellent at it in other fields). A high school history course's purpose is to teach a base set of facts, as well as to teach children the state's narrative of its own history (for better and for worse). These cirriculums are usually written by hsitorians to fulfill the state's needs. Youtube videos and podcasts contain many facts, but their interpretation of the sources lead to poor understanding of the topic, and factually incorrect statements (since they're lacking broader context to understand them). Both of these have flaws, and lead to individuals "learning" something that may be incorrect, or that they have misunderstood to the point that they have learned very little. I suppose that the point I'm trying to make is that learning about history != historical thinking, and a lack of historical thinking can inhibit the learning of history. As a side note, the Revolutions Podcast (and by extension I suppose the History of Rome, although I haven't personally listened to it) is the only popular history media that has actually impressed me with its methodology. /r/AskHistorians has a tendency to be excellent as well, albeit with some caveats.
• steve76 8y ago
  History may be a great way undergrad for law school, or as I see it, a pack of dogs, cheating at cards. How about med school? A pack of monkeys, trying to fix a car. It's very easy to be wealthy today. Fog a mirror, and you are richer than most people ever been, and money strikes like lightening. I don't know why you would want to. You make yourself a target, and people line up to take you out. It's wrong to think of the poor as victims. Usually it's many voluntary moral failings, that are actually easy to recover from fast. Watch out for the smart poor. They are more dangerous. They're just lying in wait, waiting to take someone out, and are much more effective than the rich ever will be. I wouldn't be surprised at all if History majors are some scheme to launder money, or profit off of foreign interests.
• JoeDaDude 8y ago
  Education in history can also be politicized to a large extent. Florida passed a law that defined teaching history to be solely about certain facts without interpretation or analysis. https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/september-2006/history-defined-in-florida-legislature https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/pers...
• daddylonglegs 8y ago
  I feel that narrowly defining politics as it's negative aspects is dangerous because it leaves us (English speakers) without a word for the necessary processes of organising ourselves and resolving differences between more than two people. Demagoguery, manipulation and sowing hate are all political but so is choosing to stand up to a bully on someone else's behalf. I think that many people (not the OP) use this as a device to present their preferred view as the "natural" or "only viable" view and to dismiss any consideration of alternatives as "political." Regarding the article, I think it is true that, for a couple of decades now, many players have chosen to discredit political discussion and compromise in favour of tribalism. The message crudely is that everybody lies so there is no point trying to figure anything out and you should just stick with your side. This is a political position and it is my (political) view that this is terrible. I'm not sure that I would directly link this to the number of undergraduates taking history in the US though. Everybody has political stances and a sense of history and developing both is a lifelong process where quality matters more than a particular formalism. Edit: this was meant as a reply to dalbasal but I messed up.