I thought I'd share an interesting paper that I got sent recently. It's only 17 pages but makes some good points.
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Interesting to see that clickbaity titles date back at least forty years.
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The education I received in high school and college was 'mostly' useless. It is, however, infinitely better than having nothing.
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The conclusion of course is that history is far from useless. It shouldn't be taught as "lessons" that can easily be implemented, and increasing knowledge isn't the point either, according to the author. Its value lies in experience, which is not tied to a particular case with particular facts, it may be applied to different situations - but it's far messier than those neat little lessons presented in military college classrooms. Or even than those big lessons presented in the books of famous military historians, read those with plenty skepticism but do keep reading.
The only criticism I have of this article is that the author doesn't go deep enough into the kind of lesson that would be helpful, other than point at staff rides as useful exercises. He's right, being on location, imagining yourself in the situation, makes a deeper impression than any classroom presentation. But staff rides are time-consuming and expensive, they can't replace the classroom entirely, so I would like to know what to do in class. How do we best teach history there?
Also, there are big differences between staff rides (other military academies call them battlefield tours): some put more emphasis on the historical situation, some more on what-ifs, some do a thorough reconnaissance of the terrain, some less, some require more reading in advance, some less. I've had the pleasure of accompanying staff rides from 3 different military schools. At the last one, a question came up about bridging the river at Nijmegen if the Germans had been able to blow up the existing one, so they started calculating distances, but they didn't know about summer and winter dykes. The river swells in spring and fall, spilling over the summer dykes to fill up the space beyond, which is deliberately kept open for that purpose and only used in summer for grazing. The students and their teachers didn't have this bit of local knowledge, their calculations were based on a false premise. We filled them in of course, but it made me think about what we missed on our own battlefield tours. I would like to know what the author thinks are the best format, the best preparation, etc.
The only criticism I have of this article is that the author doesn't go deep enough into the kind of lesson that would be helpful, other than point at staff rides as useful exercises. He's right, being on location, imagining yourself in the situation, makes a deeper impression than any classroom presentation. But staff rides are time-consuming and expensive, they can't replace the classroom entirely, so I would like to know what to do in class. How do we best teach history there?
Also, there are big differences between staff rides (other military academies call them battlefield tours): some put more emphasis on the historical situation, some more on what-ifs, some do a thorough reconnaissance of the terrain, some less, some require more reading in advance, some less. I've had the pleasure of accompanying staff rides from 3 different military schools. At the last one, a question came up about bridging the river at Nijmegen if the Germans had been able to blow up the existing one, so they started calculating distances, but they didn't know about summer and winter dykes. The river swells in spring and fall, spilling over the summer dykes to fill up the space beyond, which is deliberately kept open for that purpose and only used in summer for grazing. The students and their teachers didn't have this bit of local knowledge, their calculations were based on a false premise. We filled them in of course, but it made me think about what we missed on our own battlefield tours. I would like to know what the author thinks are the best format, the best preparation, etc.
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Considering the author died in 2009, I don't think we'll ever find out, but while I agree with most of what you said (he does indeed argue that it's still useful despite being neglected), I thought he did propose some interesting ideas for classrooms indirectly, without necessarily stating them outright or realizing it himself.
He emphasizes the importance of perspective, both internally for decision making and in relations with others for purposes of understanding human motivations. It's not a stretch to consider that what he had in mind is some of kind of cross between military history and sociology. Something like this was tried in a field setting starting in the early 2000's, in the form of the Human Terrain System, but it seems to have been largely discredited and ended years ago. To be fair, I'm not sure how much of it was the program's fault and how much the usual problems with government contracts/media attention, etc, but it's interesting as a concept regardless. It seems something eminently feasible in a classroom setting, whether through the use of guest specialists in their fields, some group activity with psychological components, even playing a board game, etc.
The other big emphasis he puts is on reading history while also highlighting that you can find a book catering to any conclusion you want to make about any historical event because historians pick and choose facts, have agendas, etc. From my reading of the article, he hopes that once someone reads enough, whatever enough is for them, they'll reach a Socratic level of uncertainty about history and find true wisdom through admitting to not knowing.
He seems to be in favor of encouraging reading in the students spare time to accomplish this, but failing the instructor finding a way to make reading history for fun attractive to everyone (which realistically it isn't going to be), the obvious conclusion is for the instructor to pick a few different conflicting books and make the students read them. That's obviously what happens anyways in academic settings, or at least the motions of it, but my reading of this article suggests he's arguing for pushing that to its extremes as far as it can go and finding the right combination of books would help the instructor to speed up the process.
Maybe instead of picking two books on a general theme, with a currently accepted historiographical consensus and a deviating revisionist view like often happens, find two books on the same subject that make the same conclusion but with widely different supporting facts used. The more specific the historical event, the better, as historians will naturally pick different facts to make their case. The more disparate the facts, the better, the goal being to make the students question how if X was so important to support the conclusion in the one book, why X is completely missing and Y is used instead in the other one to support the exact same conclusion.
The last argument and most applicable to our day he makes is to not nurture an unyielding belief in technological superiority/technical approaches (neglecting history in favor of a total belief in engineering, maths, etc) while also not treating the more generally educated students of today to the rote learning style that was applicable to a much less educated populace. That's also easy to apply to a classroom and has a ready source of modern examples. He argues for it in the context of Jomini's formulae vs Clausewitzian maxims, but you might just as easily point to the Russian military's reliance on the infallibility of nomogram formulas vs the more nuanced Western planning approach or the media portrayal of smart weapon precision and reliability vs the reality.
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Three points to consider when studying history:
1 - The accuracy and detail of a historical account will inevitably be affected by the need of the writer either to glorify (or absolve of wrongdoing) the individual(s) or government paying for the account, or else to further the author's personal agenda and beliefs. The audience intended to receive the account will also affect what is stated, what is assumed, and what is ignored as irrelevant to the story or chronology, even if the account is basically "true". The latter issues are particularly true of older accounts, as many of the assumptions by the author may no longer be understood by the reader.
2 - The accuracy of a historical account will depend heavily on the understanding and view of the sources of information used to generate the account. Generating an account of a battle after speaking with several soldiers on the front line will likely give a very different impression than speaking to someone high up in the chain of command, in both cases missing critical details which were not visible and/or understood from their own experiences. Until the modern era with instantaneous communication from multiple sources, it was hard enough for those in command to figure out where their own forces were and what they were doing, much less the enemy's. Now we have intentional misinformation and information overload to contend with instead.
3 - Ultimately, unless you understand WHY an event happened, and why it ended the way it did, all you've learned about it is trivia: names, dates, places, etc. Unless we understand WHY a thing happened, the only thing history is good for is allowing us to recognize our mistakes after we inevitably repeat them.
1 - The accuracy and detail of a historical account will inevitably be affected by the need of the writer either to glorify (or absolve of wrongdoing) the individual(s) or government paying for the account, or else to further the author's personal agenda and beliefs. The audience intended to receive the account will also affect what is stated, what is assumed, and what is ignored as irrelevant to the story or chronology, even if the account is basically "true". The latter issues are particularly true of older accounts, as many of the assumptions by the author may no longer be understood by the reader.
2 - The accuracy of a historical account will depend heavily on the understanding and view of the sources of information used to generate the account. Generating an account of a battle after speaking with several soldiers on the front line will likely give a very different impression than speaking to someone high up in the chain of command, in both cases missing critical details which were not visible and/or understood from their own experiences. Until the modern era with instantaneous communication from multiple sources, it was hard enough for those in command to figure out where their own forces were and what they were doing, much less the enemy's. Now we have intentional misinformation and information overload to contend with instead.
3 - Ultimately, unless you understand WHY an event happened, and why it ended the way it did, all you've learned about it is trivia: names, dates, places, etc. Unless we understand WHY a thing happened, the only thing history is good for is allowing us to recognize our mistakes after we inevitably repeat them.
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It's not so much why an event happened as HOW someone won a war, or a particular campaign or battle. The purpose of military academies is to train good officers. They don't need to become good historians, it's rather that history provides most of the empirical data for studying war. (The rest is from fictional examples, red vs. blue exercises, some formal modelling.) Officer in training (cadets) used to get a lot of history but also math, engineering, law of war, and so on. All of it is meant to make them better at their future job, so the emphasis is much more on how to do things than on a deep understanding of underlying factors. I think sometimes the balance is too much to one side, either too shallow or too impractical, but in general there's at least a good faith attempt to get it right.
Military history is of course subject to the same national myths as other subfields, maybe even a bit more, but it's counteracted to some extent by the focus on examples of good or bad operations, which can and frequently does include examples from the other side. You'll even find some admiration for the Germans in WW2, despite the horrible actions of both their government and their armed forces. (It probably helped that the Germans committed most of their atrocities on the East front and tended to treat US and UK forces according to the laws of war.)
There has been a big shift from focusing on examples of good or bad generalship to the experiences of common soldiers. That started in the 1980s and you can see traces of it in the article Victor1234 posted. Still, they're training officers so command and strategy remain important subjects, often taught as separate courses but using a lot of historical material.
I agree with most of this. We (or rather, my historian colleagues) do a lot of the things you propose, it's just that I would have liked the author to expand on it a bit more instead of us extrapolating. So, just one or two remarks on the side:
You're no doubt aware of the huge debate over military anthropology, which fed into the Human Terrain System approach. A lot of that came from civilian academics who thought it undermined their impartiality and jeopardized their ability to do fieldwork. But another, in my opinion more interesting criticism which also came from inside, was directed at the way in which HTS transformed anthropological insights into a system. It's very much along the lines of this article: just as experience is different from lessons, so anthropological insight is different from HTS. It goes deeper, is more ambiguous, more open to uncertainty. HTS is all about practicability, so it favored maps, overviews, general patterns, and didn't deal well with nuances and exceptions.
Socratic uncertainty doesn't sit well with the armed forces' need for officers who are capable of taking a decision. You could say we would like them to understand that they take decisions in situations with lots of uncertainties, so it's practical to get them used to uncertainty. But on a psychological level that's a difficult balance to maintain and it's difficult to reach as well when you're an adolescent, as almost all cadets are. Combine that with their can-do mentality and you get a deep-seated dislike of disciplines with a lot of ambiguity, including mine. I've often had students come back after a few tours in the field saying they didn't appreciate it when they were studying but they've come to see the utility in practice. (Obviously, that's a skewed sample, those who still don't appreciate it, don't stop by to say so.)
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I disagree with the title, ’Why History is Mostly Useless’, I would rather say,’Building a future without knowing history is mostly useless’.
The problems of politics and societies are built from afar. The phenomena do not reflect the time here and now, but have already been built into societies for centuries as victims of so-called colonial slavery. For instance, the history of many nations has also been to be deprived in the hands of other countries, and the fate of the people has been to be slaves of the respective power(s).
The problems of politics and societies are built from afar. The phenomena do not reflect the time here and now, but have already been built into societies for centuries as victims of so-called colonial slavery. For instance, the history of many nations has also been to be deprived in the hands of other countries, and the fate of the people has been to be slaves of the respective power(s).
There are three sides to every story, but history is written by the victor.
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Just like American Civil war was written by writers glorifying Union and WW2 by Soviet historians...no wait a minute here! Could it be that thats not actually what happened???
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WW2 was written by historians glorifying the Soviet Union. At least in the Eastern Block. Of course since the Soviet Union lost the Cold War, i.e. next round, it is not the mainstream narrative in the West.
During the Cold War, we were told the Americans, British and Canadians liberated us. They told us about the heroic role of the free Polish and how much the Soviets made them suffer (I'm not sure if this was peculiar to the Netherlands as they were active here or common to western Europe). Barely a word about the Soviet contribution to the war effort.
I was actually refering on how much WW2 history on West side of Iron Curtain was built upon memories of very biased German generals.
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I've never noticed Russian/Soviet propogandists needed help telling any tale from a perspective that makes them look noble, heroic and triumphant.
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Well, whatever they were telling themselves didn't reach us in western Europe. The other victors wrote them out of the story.
There are three sides to every story; my side, your side, and the truth.
There are already at least 3 sides before you get anywhere near the truth: Germans, Soviets, western allies. If you take into consideration that the French tell it very differently from the Brits, Austrians from Germans, Ukrainians from Russians, and so on, I don't hold much hope of reaching that wonderful goal.