Absolutely. But it is disconcerting to realize the inertia of current collective intelligence even when what is at stake is great gains in productivity and welfare and even when formally we "celebrate" the benefits of well governed, market based democracies.

It goes to show that every generation has to internalize the painful way key facts about what is good and what is bad for society, even if history provides more than enough learnings for free.

History isn't exactly the most liked subject in school. Most people continue not liking in later in life.

History is just terribly taught and practiced. At the core history is just telling stories which are always interesting when told well.

History is terribly taught because it's often about the how and not the why.

Even worse is the overemphasis on when (in terms of exactness).

Knowing the rough order of events (as per the flow of a story) is important, as is the relative timespan, but a lot of history schooling puts too much emphasis on knowing the exact dates of certain events, which I think really subtracts the experience for many.

The most interesting history we got taught at school was by one of our music teachers who was a kilt wearing Scottish independence supporter who used to tell us bloodthirsty stories about Bruce, Wallace and others...

NB This was ~45 years ago - I doubt such things would be tolerated these days. :-)

Scottish history would be far too dangerous to teach today. Undermines the narrative that all white people have a detestable history of colonisation and exploitation.

The history curriculum I was taught in school was terribly boring and politicised. Other than the mandatory WW2 coverage, the _only_ other topics we studied were the horribleness of European colonisation, like Gandhi and Apartheid, ect… I was rather surprised to grow up and find out how interesting the topic actually was.

American history id even more dangerous as it justifies the violent overthrow of the government

I suppose he skipped the part in which the Scottish elite sold out their country (literally) to the English crown?

He probably didn't mention that because it wasn't particularly bloodthirsty and therefore of little interest to 12 year old boys.

Mind you, the fact that it was events on the Isthmus of Panama that were one of the main causes of the union is fairly interesting:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darien_scheme