What is the purpose of history class?

Is it to weed out the “vocational” students from the “college prep” kids? Is it to keep you from being embarrassed in public, like what Jay Leno used to do?
Or is it to impart the wisdom necessary to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past?

If it’s the first, we’re in a good spot. As Woodrow Wilson put it in 1906, “We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class … to perform specific difficult manual tasks.” Over 115 years later, that’s pretty much what we have. [Source]

If it’s the second, we’re not doing so well. Case in point -- 56% of Americans think we shouldn’t teach Arabic numerals in school. (Those are the ones that go 0-9). [Source]

And if it’s option #3, we’re completely failing. George Santayana said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” [Source]

But repeating the past is *exactly* what we do. The best illustration of this is how we treat the aftermath of the Vietnam War. Consider this quote from Gerald Ford on page 512 of Texas' official history textbook:

“The lessons of the past in Vietnam have already been learned – learned by presidents, learned by Congress, learned by the American people – and we should have our focus on the future.”

What’s astonishing is

1. There’s no discussion of the context in which Ford said this, nor any countervailing opinion,
2. There’s no discussion about what the lessons actually are, and
3. Ford’s blithe dismissal of history is found … in a HISTORY book!

Let’s start with the context.

1.) The South Vietnamese capital of Saigon had fallen to the North on April 30, 1975.

2.) A few days earlier, Americans saw pictures of desperate South Vietnamese climbing onto rooftops, trying to escape the city on helicopters that could take them to U.S. Navy ships just off-shore. The USS Midway's flight deck was so crowded, the crew resorted to pushing helicopters over the side to make space. [Source]
3.) Ford said this on May 6, 1975, during a press conference in which he dismissed Congress’s idea of a study to establish those “lessons of Vietnam,” which he considered "divisive." His quote was in response to the question, "Don't you think that we can learn from the past?"
4.) Ford's comment was lampooned in political cartoons like this one by Doug Marlette. [Source]
Putting the past behind may have been politically expedient at the time, but by failing to remember the past, we doomed ourselves to repeat it, and that’s exactly what happened in 2021 as we left Afghanistan with a very public timeline for our departure. [Source]

But again, events overtook us, and again, the American public witnessed images of desperate people – those who were the most welcoming of the American presence – forced to flee their own country. [Source]

We ignore the lessons of history to our own peril. We could have learned from the past, but we didn’t do it then, and we’re not doing it now. It's far easier to teach the simple fact that Ford said those words than examine them in any detail.

But don’t worry – if history is any guide, there will probably be another chance in the future to learn the same thing ... again.