Orson Scott Card, as he so often does, says it better than I can:
In America we’re all voters — but nobody checks to make sure we have any sense at all about how we vote. I urge every American to regard history as the first and most important study of our lives — the minimum requirement to be a good citizen.
And instead of relying on our castrated and/or politicized textbooks (by Left and Right), which grossly under- and mis-educate our young, we should be reading independent histories every chance we get.
As I have often said–heck, it was long in my blog header–
“In a democracy (‘rule by mob’), those who refuse to learn from history are in the majority and dictate that everyone else suffer for their ignorance.”-third world county’s corollary to Santayana’s Axiom