> Music, history, and calculus are useful to some people, but not nearly as many.
I couldn't imagine not introducing my kids to History, Music, the Classics and so on. I value them far higher than my experience with Computing, Finance, Law, what have you. What a pointless life to only have interest into things that are productive.
I find teaching history essential. It helps understand the present, why things are as they are, and avoid repeating mistakes.
I had many different teachers with different approaches. Ones it was all about memorizing events and dates. Of course that is trash. But others is was about understanding why it went the way it went, why not other way. What were the key events that triggered another events, under which circumstances... alone the critical thinking that went into that, is every minute worth it.
History is absolutely fascinating (one of my favorite subjects), but not very useful. History has too high of causal density to allow drawing any clear lessons. We’ve studied WWI and WWII extensively, and nobody’s really sure what ‘caused’ either. Was it the shooting of an archduke that caused both? What about the arms buildups? The alliances? Just flukes? It’s not clear, and it never will be.
History is a beautiful subject and a great hobby, but almost completely useless. On the other hand, every student needs to understand finance and the law, both on the individual level, and in order to be a thoughtful voter.
That part of history, like the two WW, of course. The sample size is too small. It is not like: "I will look what happened in the past, and apply that today." That is most likely impossible, just because of context. But trying to understand what happened, really helps as a gymnastic to understand world dynamics. For example, good history teaching should have helped Europe to not be so dependent of Russian gas... I think the people making the decision there were not paying attention in history classes, or had bad teachers/professors.
But if you for example analyze the rise and fall of cities, empires and civilizations, there are some things you can learn (e.g. overuse of resources). Also the the economical crisis, bubbles and inflation teaches a lot of things.
Studying totalitarian regimes in the past, can help to detect the first signs of alarm.
It is not an exact science, yes. But knowing the past helps to understand the present, and helps to not repeat mistakes. I really think it does.
Introducing kids to hobbies they might enjoy is good. But the fact that we teach them upper-class hobbies, and only upper-class hobbies, in school, suggests we're not doing it solely for their benefit.
How do you define "introduce"? When I went to school I'm pretty sure I had to take the music subject for around 10-11 years. First we had to learn the flute (no singing), then our third class teacher was shocked that no one could hit a not when singing. A little later it was a mix of good and bad, but mostly getting grades for singing, without ever properly being taught anything (not talking about the first 2 grades here, also ever onward, in a class of 30) and then some mix of tests on musical history.
The outcome? I still enjoy music despite this torture of lessons, but I never properly learned to play an instrument, and was mostly dissuaded instead of encouraged.
I would rather analyze deep finance than listen to music. I just don’t enjoy music, at all.
Spreadsheets and algorithms on the other hand I find highly entertaining. I love many board games for this same reason: it’s an opportunity to build novel algorithms in strange domains to achieve a specific purpose.
And most can see that boardgames are more similar to “productive things” you find disdainful than music.
It’s always been my impression that school history is more about indoctrination than any broadly applicable lesson. I took as much as I could in high school, and loved my teachers, but I’m not sure I learned anything I can apply outside the classroom.
Would be interesting to know when or if that's still the current case.
In Germany I found the focus on WW2 a tad much (but that was '93 to '02). Sure, it's important, but I think they could've gone at least one year out of nine where it wouldn't come up, and instead ignoring a huge amount of epochs outright, or with a laser focus on central europe.
I couldn't imagine not introducing my kids to History, Music, the Classics and so on. I value them far higher than my experience with Computing, Finance, Law, what have you. What a pointless life to only have interest into things that are productive.