Intellectual Inequality

[ashling]

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-decline-of-historical-thinking?fbclid=IwAR3skIVQ4_e2bjIZHWPS-ubjJDoCKVCxcxZg6iIEWGEyIfwKTVWsECesFPc

The Decline of Historical Thinking

The reason that students at Yale and places like it can “afford” to major in history is that they have the luxury of seeing college as a chance to learn about the world beyond the confines of their home towns, and to try to understand where they might fit in. That’s what history does best. It locates us and helps us understand how we got here and why things are the way they are. “History instills a sense of citizenship, and reminds you of questions to ask, especially about evidence,” Willis told me. In a follow-up e-mail to our conversation, Mikhail wrote, “A study of the past shows us that the only way to understand the present is to embrace the messiness of politics, culture, and economics. There are never easy answers to pressing questions about the world and public life.” Bruce Springsteen famously developed a profound political consciousness after happening upon Allan Nevins and Henry Steele Commager’s “A Pocket History of the United States,” first published in 1942. In his recent Broadway show, Springsteen explained, “I wanted to know the whole American story. . . . I felt like I needed to understand as much of it as I could in order to understand myself.”

Donald Trump is the king not only of lies but also of ahistorical assertions. It’s hard to pick a favorite among the thousands of falsehoods that Trump has told as President, but one recent shocker was when he insisted, ignoring everything we know about the Soviet Union’s lawless behavior, that “the reason Russia was in Afghanistan was because terrorists were going into Russia. They were right to be there.” (The usually Trump-friendly Wall Street Journal editorial page claimed, “We cannot recall a more absurd misstatement of history by an American President.”) Republicans, for the past few decades, have depended on Americans’ inability to make sense of history in judging their policies. How else to explain the fact that, under Trump, they have succeeded in turning legal immigration into the excuse for all the country’s ills, when any clear historical analysis would demonstrate that it has been the fount of the lion’s share of America’s innovation, creativity, and economic production?



“Yes, we have a responsibility to train for the world of employment, but are we educating for life, and without historical knowledge you are not ready for life,” Blight told me. As our political discourse is increasingly dominated by sources who care nothing for truth or credibility, we come closer and closer to the situation that 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,” he wrote. A nation whose citizens have no knowledge of history is asking to be led by quacks, charlatans, and jingos. As he has proved ever since he rode to political prominence on the lie of Barack Obama’s birthplace, Trump is all three. And, without more history majors, we are doomed to repeat him.

[912gdm]

1. okay...

[KY_EnviroGuy]

2. Good article and thanks for posting.

Very disturbing trends, especially outside the Ivy League......

Anyone not believing Republicans want to dumb-down America and destroy our culture needs to study what Scott Walker's gang has done to Wisconsin's once-great system of education.......

[doctorzuma]

3. Donald TRump knows his-story

unfortunately, that's all he knows.

[Perseus]

4. This is by design

Republicans have dictatorship tendencies, mostly out of greed and their hunger for power, they clearly understand that an uneducated people are much easier to manipulate, case in point the MAGA movement which its majority of supporters come from the very uneducated masses, and those who have the education and still support it don't do it out of ideology but because they feel it will allow them to fulfill their hunger for money and power, patriotism excluded.

That is why Betsy Devos was assigned to the department of education, it will take many years to rebuild all the destruction she has accomplished. Charter schools are part of the plan, to continue supporting it is just being complicit to the destruction of the education system in the USA. It has been proven time and again that Charter schools do not provide better education than the public system, but nonetheless many people think their kids will get a better education in that corrupt system. As long as the people believe it and support it, the people in power will funnel money that should have gone into the public system to support a corrupt one. Lets be real, part of the idea of the Charter schools was to take money from the tax payers to enrich those involved, the idea was never to provide better education. A principal at a charter school makes three times what a principal at a public school makes, its all about the money.

[JHB]

5. Trumpnobabble

Like technobabble, it sounds like it means something unless you know what all the pieces of it mean and know that fitting them together that way is nonsense or bullshit.

[Martin Eden]

6. Bookmarked n/t

[vlyons]

7. There is no excuse for NOT knowing history

or any of the other liberal arts, for that matter. My only regret is that at 72 yr, I'm running out of time to learn even more. Sadly, one lifetime is simply not enough time. The study of liberal arts and fine arts, humanizes us. It teaches us to be better humans with more compassionate hearts, more discriminating awareness, more socially adept at dealing with life's difficulties.

[ashling]

9. By George you've got it

[zaj]

8. Give them all a Bible and call it a day... Right?

[vlyons]

10. and a gun

don't forget the gun, preferably an assault gun *snark*

[Duppers]

11. Bingo. Too many think EXACTLY that. nt

[Duppers]

12. Thank you! Great article.

[applegrove]

13. Right wing in canada keeps threatening to go after cbc news (tv and

public radio). They know it makes Canadians from all income brackets strong. They hate that. It is free education for new immigrants. I worked for a recent immigrant from Pakistan for a while. He was all about CBC Radio.