Or used to ...

... Curing Provincialism: Why We Educate the Way We Do - A Conversation with Jacques Barzun. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

The student who reads history will unconsciously develop what is the highest value of history: judgment in world affairs. This is a permanent good, not because history repeats--we can never exactly match past and present situations--but because the "tendency of things" shows an amazing uniformity within any given civilization. The great historian, Jacob Burckhardt, said of historical knowledge, it is not "to make us more clever the next time, but wiser for all time."