Hello there, I have worked in the public history field for about 2-3 years giving tours of historical sites to school groups. Oftentimes, they were initially very uninterested in what I had to say, I don't really blame them since they were very tired from their trips and probably stuck memorizing for standardized tests.
Not a lot of room for passion for history to develop. So how do you get them interested? Why should you learn?
Simple, because it is the story of you, I use parallels to their own lives to expand on history. Everyone loves to learn more about the human condition and it is always interesting to get to know how things were done in the past.
More importantly, people in the present must understand history (especially in an area of polarized politics) because history is often hijacked to push for one particular agenda or another. Without understanding history, it is very easy for logic and facts to get lost in the vitriol of politics, which in turn, affects policies and the populations they apply on.
Without history, you cannot understand the context behind why the world is in the state it is, and without understanding the why-how can you solve the issue?
To study history goes beyond merely avoiding the past mistakes, but to actively seek how to fix the current mistakes, to make the world you live in better (as cliche as it sounds). Through the pursuit of more historical knowledge, we unlock more aspects about our own identities as human beings, reconnecting to the very soul of what it is to be human.
In the end, if we stop pursuing what is human, what are we left with?
Currently in college, I took on history because I needed those free As and now accidentally have 80% of a history degree, so if they need a GPA booster, learn history! /s
In all seriousness though, learning history I think has a few benefits. Firstly, the actual learning process. As someone who is banking on a STEM degree to pay my bills in the future, history classes have provided me an invaluable environment to practice my literary skills. Unpacking historical materials like primary source documents and dense academic publications makes for a great way to hone one's writing and reading skills. Never, in any of the undergraduate and one graduate level history classes that I have taken, have I been required to stare at a wall of dates and statistics and simply hard memorize everything presented to me. The classes have always been focused on analysis and written synthesis. These skills are super, super valuable for professional work. No one wants to write like a half-literate fuckhead when drafting cover-letters.
The other aspect is the history itself. Some of history is just straight up awesome. I mean don't be that guy who goes to a party and spouts off shit like 'hurr durr did you know that the eight-legged essay format for the Ming Imperial Examinations was designed to test not only a scholar's grasp on neo-Confucian principles but also the flow and style of his academic prose?'. It's awesome for example, if you find yourself at a UNESCO world heritage site. You can appreciate the significance of the thing everyone else is gawking at and silently be awed. History also helps people understand each other and I think that if everyone just sat down and did a little reading - like high school AP level stuff - we could all just get along a little better. The history of the past is set in stone, and nothing we do can ever change that.
So I'm a junior studying History and Classics, but History is my true love. There have been great answers so far and I just wanted to toss in my two cents about valuable skills the study of history offers, based largely on my personal experiences and from what many of my professors have said when asked a similar question.
History facilitates great skills for nearly any profession. I see reading and writing have been mentioned, and yes, definitely those are what become most well developed, but there are other really great benefits that have countless real world applications. Most prominently in my mind is critical thinking. In studying history, you work with complex, multi-layered events that have many different factors of cause, effects, and all this is conveyed through countless different representations via memory and historical writing. To be able to look at these documents and evaluate the usefullness of them as source is an invaluable skill. Beyond this, you have to consider the information from these sources in relationship to one another and develop a suitable understanding to create an argument that is essentially just well sourced critical analysis. While neither of these skills are found only in the history major, they are definitelt there and definitely useful in the real world. It's sometimes easy, sometimes hard, but always rewarding. I'm currently writing my undergrad thesis, it's shaping up to be about 25 pages and I'm thrilled everytime I work on it!
Also, I almost forgot, but understanding archives and how to navigate them is a great skill that many companies, especially law firms and fortune 500s, love because there is a lot of information in this world to be stored and sifted through.
You may be interested in answers from myself and others in this thread.