Is History History?

The dumbing down of the United States is getting worse. Food for thought:

"George Orwell famously forewarned in 1984, 'Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.' We shouldn't be surprised then by some recent, disturbing trends in the study of history. According to a new analysis by the American Historical Association, the number of students choosing to major in history at the nation's colleges has plummeted. Undergraduate history majors have fallen by more than a third in less than a decade, declining to their lowest levels since the '80s. The evidence indicates that the vanishing history major is not a short-term response to the Great Recession's lousy job market. If anything, the trend is accelerating. The undergraduate history major seems to be on the way out. [...]

"While understandable, the sharp national decline in studying the past should worry all of us, not just history professionals. Few history majors... become historians, but they do move on to become citizens. Knowledge of the past provides young people with a sense of place and a concept of temporal continuity, lessons to apply to the present and future, an interpretive framework and perspective for navigating the choppy global world. An epidemic of historical amnesia already plaques this country, which has often paid a terrible price and done grave harm to other foreign people and lands due to its ignorance of the past... " (History majors are becoming a thing of the past, except in the Ivy League, Marc Wortman, thedailybeast.com, 4/1/19