"When I was 16 years old, I sat in a crowded assembly hall on a wobbly plastic chair, and I listened to Mr. Smith tell me why I should study history. All of the teachers had to do it. "Sell your subject," the headmaster had said. "Make the kids want to pick it." Some teachers did so with the grudging monotone of the forced and underpaid employee. Some did it with the exhausting energy of a fanatic."
""History is like a guidebook for how to live," he began. "We can learn from people's mistakes and can unpack where things went wrong. Almost all the greatest leaders in the world knew their history, and almost all of the biggest mistakes were because people didn't study it enough. As the German philosopher Hegel put it, 'We learn from history that we do not learn from history.'""
"Hegel's famous quote appears in a section of his works where he is criticizing what he calls "pragmatical" history. Hegel noted that there was a certain kind of "Renaissance man" who would tend to quote Cicero or Seneca for advice about how to live now. "Avoid parties hosted by those outside philosophy," Epictetus once wrote, and even I would find it hard to get invited to - let alone enjoy - a philosophers-only party these days."
A student remembers a teacher urging students to study history by citing Hegel's line that we fail to learn from history. Teachers used varied methods to persuade pupils, from monotone to costume. The teacher framed history as a guidebook for living and quoted Hegel to show recurring human error. Hegel's original point targeted a kind of "pragmatical" history that treats ancient moral sayings as timeless instructions. Hegel argued that historical circumstances are unique to their time, place, and people, so past examples cannot be indiscriminately applied to modern life.
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