Ignoring history is the biggest reason why the same problems keep recurring. When people forget how a situation came to be, they can no longer avoid it. And when they find themselves in that situation again they don't remember how they got out of it either. Discounting history is like dismissing your experiences instead of learning from them, and it's why the life of the world is so cyclical.

That's what I tried to tell him, but he says that you don't have to look back on a situation in order to assess the current problem. The example he gives is the credit crisis, and that one wouldn't have to look back on an event such as the Great Depression. People should have just seen that lending money to people with bad credit was a bad idea.

I'm really trying to have him write down his own argument. It would make this a whole lot easier.

Hm... based on what you’ve said i can't really see why he's wrong. After all, just “assessing the current problem” is very different from knowing how to resolve it and avoid it in the future. For example, it is very easy to look at a broken computer and say, “The problem is that this computer is broken.” You can even analyze how it’s broken. For example: “It’s screen is cracked and it won’t turn on.” But only when you look at history can you confidently say: “when you throw your computer across the room it will break. It would probably be a good idea not to throw it across the room in the future.” You didn’t really need past experience to tell you that the computer was broken. I think that might be what your friend is getting at?

The thing is, it might seem really obvious that throwing your computer across the room would break it. But think about this. We only think it’s obvious because we’ve thrown other things in the past that have broken. Only after breaking a few things do we begin to understand that it’s a bad idea to throw things that we value. Through the combined knowledge of everything that’s happened in our lives we can draw logical conclusions and come to act on them. History is the same way. Of course we think it’s obvious that lending money to people with bad credit is a bad idea, but people do anyway. Before the great depression people did it all the time. Obviously they didn’t think it was a bad idea. We only think it’s obvious because the combination of our historical and personal perspectives gives us the experience we need to draw accurate conclusions. Like my dad says, “It’s only obvious if you know it.”

The problem is we often take that learning process for granted, and sometimes we don’t even realize when it occurs. So, arrogantly, we believe that the intelligence we posses is our own, as if it is in our genetic makeup to be smart. The study of history is so ingrained in all aspects of American society that it shapes our perception without us even realizing it. The only reason why people think we can ignore it is because they don’t know what we would be like without it. History, like any other kind of learning expands your brain and exercises your intelligence. It is especially similar to reading because it expands our world and challenges our minds in ways that make it easier to understand our immediate surroundings and judge the quality of our lives. That's why, if you want your slaves to be submissive and complacent, then be sure they don’t learn how to read. Those who do away with history choose to cripple their minds and exile themselves from the world.

Please excuse my rant XD did i help or just confuse you?

Yeah, I get what you mean. I understand his view to an extent. But I'm glad you wrote this because it says everything I wanted to say to him. I wanted to bring up reading to him, but it slipped my mind. Indeed, history is defined as all things recorded with prehistory being before writing was invented. (Although I think that's a different point in and of itself.) But yeah, history is just ingrained in our society. You can't just erase history and expect to make progress off of nothing.

What he really wants is a specific example. I'm really gonna try to get him to make his argument for himself.

Sara has been trying to get me to say why history is not important for a while, and I've been pretty resistant. Mainly because I think I would sound like an ass if I just talked about how pointless a subject is, especially a subject that a lot of people really like. I'm not trying to be mean, I just don't understand why it matters.

People always say that history matters so you won't repeat the mistakes in the past, but I really don't think that's an accurate statement. If you think about world war 2, reguardless of whether or not you know what happens, I'm confident that if we saw a man trying to kill a bunch of people, we would realize that was probably a bad thing, and try to stop it. that's a really vague example, but it still holds true for really specific things also. Like, terrorism. You could be like, if you know the history of 9/11 you would be aware of terrorism, so we need to fight it. But really, you should be able to look at the current situation and say "Hmmm, there are groups of people that really want to kill Americans. We should do something about that".

Someone else brought up an interesting point above me that makes it sound like you do need to know history to understand things. I think there's a difference though between history and your own personal past experiences. Of course you learn from your own past experiences that something breaks when you drop it, so you shouldn't drop things. That's different from history though. All your decisions are based on your past experiences, but that doesn't mean you need to know the history of something to know what is best to do. You should be able to look at the current situation, and decide what the best outcome is, reguardless of the past.

Sorry I'm replying to this whole debate thing pretty late. So here's my very long and drawn out argument.

There's a ton of ways why you can say that history is awesome or pointless. If you take the side of history being a useless subject that is just a waste of your school's curriculum, then you're deeply mistaken. History increases our awareness of everything. Understanding history to a deeper level also corresponds to a better understanding of human nature (ex. what was the reasoning behind a country's actions, how people cope and deal with tragedy, etc.). You get a grasp of different perspectives from the points of views of different countries, cultures, and more. If all you ever learned in elementary school and middle school was American history, then your viewpoint would be that 'America is number one! We overthrew the British bad guys and became the best in the world with industrialization, modernization blah blah blah.' And that's not the point of learning history. When you get to take high school and college history classes you learn that the original people that went to America were completely hopeless bastards, and while America eventually did gain the lead in production of certain material goods (they did it at the expense of cheap immigrant labor), you look at our developing economic situation and it sucks compared to many parts of the world that we thought to be inferior to us.
One of the reasons why America is now pathetically ignorant is because we still hold some of the typical spoon-fed teachings of history from elementary school. We live in a box where we think that we’re the only ones that exist in the world. Many people don’t have a clue how foreign relations work or how much we depend on other countries for economic stability and products. Many people don’t really care that we’re in a shit-load of debt. I can give you an easy example by the stock market the past few weeks where people argued that the government was totally stupid for proposing a bailout plan for some of the largest banks in America. But they couldn’t propose a better plan themselves. They just bitched because they saw on the headlines that a lot of money was going to banks. They don’t have any understanding of how influential banks are and how economics works in a depression. They don’t understand how America’s standing also influences foreign countries and how foreign markets affect us. It just shows the sheer ignorance of Americans and how sad we’ve become.
The point is, that although you’re a college student and you think that you’re smarter that a lot of other people who don’t have higher education, if you fail to recognize history as a significant part of your education then you are just as bad, if not worse, than the person who works for a minimum wage. You are worse in the sense that you have the opportunity to become educated and dismiss history as a useless subject. You are intentionally putting yourself in the class of ignorant Americans, thereby increasing the amount of stupidity that already exists instead of helping others recognize that there are other places that exist outside of our borders and knowing the history of our relationships with them and the history of America.

You have the right to keep your opinion of the usefulness of history, but at least realize that your belief will only hurt you.