Feb 10, 2019 3 min read

If you wanted to be considered a learned person, it was once a necessity to learn Latin. To that end, classrooms were filled 60 or 70 years ago with students trying to master phrases like “labor ipse voluptas,” “radix malorum est cupiditas” or “barba crescit caput nescit.”

But areas of emphasis shift, standards change, and one can now be considered reasonably well-educated without knowing that “barba crescit caput nescit” means “beard grows, (but the) head doesn’t grow wiser.”

So an argument could be made that a study unveiled in November showing that the number of history majors has significantly declined at colleges and universities over the last decade is nothing to fret about. Students are still graduating and pouring into the workforce without having to grind out papers on the Peloponnesian War or the Teapot Dome scandal. Whatever will be, will be.

But this is indeed something that should concern us. A drop in the number of history majors isn’t something that should be shrugged off like a cloudy day. The fewer people there are studying history, the more shallow our understanding of the past, and the more likely we are to repeat the mistakes of the past, or misunderstand what is happening in the present.

According to the study that was conducted by Benjamin Schmidt, an assistant professor of history at Northeastern University in Boston, there’s been a 33 percent decline in the number of history majors at colleges and universities around the country since 2011. Schmidt credits this decline, at least in part, to the Great Recession that started in 2008, and students experiencing greater pressure to choose academic programs that make them more “marketable,” even as there is no evidence that history majors fare any worse in the job market than students in other programs.

“Students and their parents seem to be thinking a lot more that they need to major in something practical, (something that is) likely to get them a job at the back end,” Schmidt told The Chronicle of Higher Education. “Students think that history, humanities, English and philosophy are not those practical majors.”

Though worries about debt and employment are understandable, our civic and cultural life will be weakened if the lion’s share of our universities and colleges become little more than institutions where students are trained for the labor market. Writing for The New Yorker website last week, columnist Eric Alterman noted we could be lurching toward a state of affairs where students at elite schools will still major in history, comfortable in the knowledge that any degree will open doors for them, while students who attend less-renowned state or regional schools will bypass history and the liberal arts and instead pursue degrees in areas where they expect an easy monetary return.

The historian David Blight, who teaches at Yale and wrote the 2018 biography, “Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom,” told Alterman, “Yes, we have a responsibility to train for the world of employment, but we are educating for life, and without historical knowledge you are not ready for life.”

Without historical knowledge you are not ready for life. That’s something we all should remember. Even if you are many years older than today’s college students.