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Originally Posted by Grin -N- Bear IT
Has anyone said History? If history classes are so important and I should take as many as I can (according to friends I respect) then why the **** can I name off five random people I know from hs who majored in history and are currently unemployed (B.A obv).
I'm looking at the college price tag and trying to wrap my head around why taking a random history class is more important instead of replacing it with a class that I think would be more applicable to my major/ future career. What does taking the class do that buying the book and reading it in my free time wouldn't?
Forgive me, no disrespect to history. It's informative and interesting and people can learn from the past etc etc. but I feel like i'd be burning my hard earned money.
History teaches you critical thinking, analysis, and writing skills. All things that are pretty valuable in the marketplace. You have to be able to sit down and read and understand difficult texts, let’s say something like Galileo’s “Letter to the Duchess Christina” in which he gives a thorough explanation of his notions about the relationship between the new science and religion. You have to be able to read that difficult text and understand all of the nuances of it within the context of the Reformation, Counter-Reformation, and Scientific Revolution. You would then have to be able to write cogently about it. If you can learn to do that and do it well, you’ve acquired pretty valuable skills that many employers would find desirable. Learning to think and do complex analysis and then write cogently is pretty important, imo. History is not just about reading some book and learning facts. That’s not what we do in history classes at all.
The problem is that most people don’t realize how stupid they are. They don’t realize how terrible their writing is. They don’t realize this because they simply don’t know any better. But most people would do relatively well to take some advanced history classes.
And there are plenty of things that people do with a history major. I’ve had students do all kinds of different things. I’ve had many become teachers and a fair share go on to law school. I’ve also had many students go into the business world, become journalists, work on Capitol Hill as a senate staffer, etc. I’ve had several students go into the military after doing officer training. I have one former student who is a diplomat and works for the State Department in Latin America. I just did an interview with the FBI for another student who is approaching the final stages of employment with the CIA. It just depends on what you want to do, but the good thing about history is that it keeps many doors open. A lot of majors close doors. The reality is that (assuming a job doesn’t require specialized skills like engineering or something) history teaches skills that are highly sought after by most recruiters.