Poll: History, an important subject?

[Deadman Walkin]

When it comes to Canada, at least here the curriculum touches on a lot of important things. Such as Canada/Britain screwing over the native people when we came here. However, they took it much too far. I am in grade 11 currently of 12, and since grade 3 I have learned about how much we hurt their culture and how our ancestors are horrible people. It gets very repetitive, and boring and I wonder if this is them getting their revenge. I GET IT, we destroyed your culture, forced you into ours and made your people unstable. It isn't my fault, I can't change it so stop telling me how perfect your life was before my culture came in and colonized.

I mean I learned about it for about 2-4 months of every year in that period. 3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10 and soon to be in 11. Makes me want to not even bother with it anymore.

 

[Commissar Sae]

Those who do not know history are doomed to repeate it, what they fail to mention is that people who DO know history are still going to repeate it.

Yes, but the upside is that we can choose to repeat the successes rather than the failures.

I also disagree about history serving as cultural indoctrination, but it really depends what level the class is at. High School, yeah, more or less. University level, not even remotely.

 

[The-BlubbereR]

history has always been useful to me, otherwise i wouldn't get half of the jokes on The Simpsons

 

[Eclectic Dreck]

History is important in certain fields. Any sort of predictive analysis without a strong understanding of relevent history is nothing but a guess afterall.

History however, is not actually important in any other situation. The reason is simple - the history we know is generally only tangentially related to the truth of the moment. It rarely matters what actually happened - only what was believed to have happened. Since cultures are willing to place equal value on myth and legend as they are with a well documented and generally verifiable account, one can generally assume that history has no more value than a widely believed lie.