In a way it’s correct to say that it was inevitable, because it did happen. All the other alternatives didn’t, even if we believe they could have.
Really, nobody actually studies history going forward. We don't for example study random people's backgrounds on the off chance they might have an impact. Rather we pick important figures based on what they did and then go back and take a look at their backgrounds.
So the trap in teaching history going forward is you hide why things are being studied. The most critical part is filtering and thus ignoring 99.99999% of what happened. Further by focusing on only important things people start to associate importance with what is being focused on right now.
I don’t believe that to be correct, actual history studies seem to be a lot of back-and-forth on topics surrounding, let’s say, a particular event that we know happened or believe to happened. Then in this back-and-forth you will have the spotlight on some specific characters who seem to be related to the event (and then, as you said, a huge part of the actual details are filtered out, I don’t see how that could be otherwise). So of course you have to go in the past to focus on an event.
> So the trap in teaching history going forward is you hide why things are being studied.
Aren’t topics studied because they are believed to be true, or because researchers think that there is some interesting knowledge to find? What are those reasons that we hide?
> Further by focusing on only important things people start to associate importance with what is being focused on right now.
Sorry, I don’t understand what you mean by that.
Research is not the same as education. History education has frequently been used as indoctrination for example. This plays into why the focus is on rulers more often than say low level economic details.
Which is what I am getting at. We have a vast quantity of solid information about the past, teaching is mostly about picking what to present not how accurate something is. First grade history texts are full of inaccurate information, but that's not really relevant to their purpose.
Sure, research can get into nitty gritty details like the tradeoff in knot designs used on ships. It can be interesting, but it's impact on society is basically nonexistent.
Disagreeing with this:
> History is about what happened, not what could have happened.
If you toss a coin you will get one result; saying it was "inevitable" because it happened is to misunderstand everything about randomness and statistics, etc.
Now, let’s say that you have an actual toss of coin at one point in history that results in a missile being launched. The missile has been launched, that cannot be changed. The fact that tossing the coin n times more results in differents results doesn’t change the fact that the missile has been launched. Sure you can speculate what would happen if the result would have been different the first time, and your educated speculation may even be pretty good and based on strong facts, that doesn’t change the fact that you’re now in a fictional scenario.
That seems to be a rational point of view to defend, I would be interested to know what flaws you see.
Also, random is just random. It's not "too many parameters for me to keep track of and account for". That's a very important distinction. Many people believe "chance" is a word used to cover our ignorance. But that's not what it means.
That’s a very reductionist summary of what I wrote that I wouldn’t consider accurate.
I disagree that there is nothing to learn from what happened, even without considering alternative reality (by the way, I’m not arguing against that, as I said that’s just closer to fiction than history, but that’s still an interesting tool). You can see patterns and systems, name and describe them, try to see if we can find similarities with other events. But you cannot change their output, because it already happened.
Randomness is defined by the lack of patterns and predictability, in practice a system chaotic enough will be considered random (see your toss of coin, in fact it’s just a physic problem with a very high number of parameters).
I believe that you give way too much credit to the concept of pure chance (that you don’t define). I personally believe that human history is mainly the result of high level systems interacting with each other (thus can be described and analyzed), studying them backward seems to be prone to a lot of bias as we are trying to make them reach what we consider to be the contemporary state.