It is amazing how dull history books are, given how much what's in them must be invented," Amos Tversky, one of the great psychologists of the 20th century, wrote.
Before he died, Tversky's work with colleague Daniel Kahneman on cognitive bias upended numerous academic disciplines, from economics to medicine. Their findings destroyed the long-held belief that humans were rational creatures that would always act in their own self-interest.
Through a number of clever experiments, the duo was able to show how hard the mind works to rationalize what are actually dumb choices.
In its frantic efforts to make sense of so much incoming information, the human brain is always looking for shortcuts, so quick decisions are made based on past observations, not on the actual events happening in the present.
For historians, this exposed the artifice of much of their discipline, that their work was more story than history and that convenient narratives drafted in hindsight to explain the unexplainable were actually worthless.
If history repeats itself, after all, then why are historians as surprised as the rest of us when the unexpected happens?
That research further discredited an academic field of study that most people - and most intellectuals as Tversky's comment shows - already find boring and a waste of time.
Sadly, when George Davison, the president of the Federation of Post-Secondary Educators, pointed out that CNC now only offers four history classes, not the 19 that were available when he taught there from 1990 to 2009, he used that fact to attack the B.C. Liberals, instead of doing his job as a historian and explaining why that decline happened.
Perhaps it's because he's to blame as much or more than any government.
The problem with history starts long before students reach college or university.
By and large, the history taught to elementary and secondary school students is a dull litany of facts and dates. Kids may hate math but they get how important it is to work at it because of the many careers that depend on numerical literacy.
History? They despise it because there seems no point to it. How does it matter that in 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue?
It might matter more if Christopher Columbus was portrayed as the greedy, genocidal monster he actually was, rather than as a brave explorer, James Loewen argues in Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Texbook Got Wrong.
In that book and its companion, Lies Across America, Loewen blames historians for the demise of the study of history. By sanitizing and simplifying history, he argues, the academics took all the uncertainty away. What's the point of exploring a field of study that already has all the answers and no new questions? Many historians also told the stories they wanted to tell and people wanted to hear - the industrious European explorers who settled North America, for example - and not the more troubling truth about the genocide of indigenous peoples and the environmental devastation caused by those same explorers.
While other academic disciplines and the trades constantly seek new students and public support, historians - past and present - seem to make no such effort. Kids go to science camps and career orientations that feature almost everything but the lowly historian. The closest job option presented to young people is to be either a librarian or an archivist. In other words, preserving valuable documents and artifacts is noble work but training people who will actually be able to interpret that material and its value to society is unnecessary.
At the post-secondary level across Canada and the United States, students flock into engineering, law, technology, health, business and the physical and natural sciences and as far away from history and the other humanities as possible. According to a Globe and Mail report earlier this month, postsecondary enrolment in the humanities fell six per cent in 2014/15, the most recent year statistics are available. The year before that, national enrolment in the humanities fell five per cent.
That's a tragedy because the study of history has a role to play in addressing many of society's most pressing problems. In Canada, for example, there will be no proper reconciliation with First Nations without an honest and accurate historical account of the genocide that started with first contact and continued through residential schools.
History has a role to play in everything from helping refugees settle and responsible resource development to improving outcomes in education and health care.
History, like all the sciences, is riddled with complexity and unanswered questions.
Making younger generations and the broader public aware of that will attract interest to the field and the more curious minds exploring the past as a way of explaining the present, the better.
Tversky and Kahneman's research didn't ruin history as a field of study, in the same way it didn't ruin economics. Their findings simply demand that historians acknowledge their inherent biases, hold their findings up to more rigorous assessment, accept the limits of their understanding and celebrate the many ways history can make everyone's lives better.
Now that's a story worth telling.
-- Managing editor Neil Godbout
