I say history is for analysis because honestly anything that would let you truly understand today isn’t taught. Yes you will learn about segregation, but my history classes barely touched my grandparent’s time, so it’s hard to connect that middle missing period to today. Sure. I’m the mind of person to go fill in that middle period, but many people aren’t.

What was useful to me was the analysis part. Seeing how bias was in sources. Seeing how different people had the same sources, but different conclusions. Yes, seeing how a past event caused a future event.

But, I don’t think many people in the US connect US history with why we have many things going on today. Grade school history isn’t going to give that. My college history lessons did though. I had a whole ass history class on nothing by lobbying and I really gained an appreciation for why lobby should exist, how Americans are ridiculous, and how writing laws to keep the good of something, but not the bad is really hard. But no, I cannot tell you anything about the history of lobbying to day I spent 3 months studying and debating about it.

Back to math for a bit. I think that the logic part of math needs to be brought more into focus again. I think that programming is only going to become more and more important and it’s a shame we’re not teaching any of the fundamentals to allow people to even do things by make fancy excel formulas.